Into The Rabbit Hole

I was amazed just now.

I love the smell of bleach, but I just don’t use much of it anymore… something to do with dying streaks of funny colors into my favorite clothes. Now I’m really aware of which rags I use with bleach– and I end up keeping said bleached rag in the laundry until I can get a sufficient quantity of laundry that I won’t mind streaks of cream or white on… Which takes a pretty long time to happen.

I am going to miss getting high off of the bathroom cleaning fumes prior to bathing… because I’m notorious for cleaning the tub immediately before getting into a nice hot bath… but, I’m not going to miss the sad discovery I’ve made a million times when I realize that there’s still ajax in the tub that I’m sitting in…

So, check it out. Baking soda cleans just as well as any bleach powder, and scrubbing bubbles, and any other junk that’s got stuff that leaches into our drinking water even during the purifying process. Baking soda has no major side effects other than alkylization and curing a plethora of acidic problems like heartburn. And frankly, you’re not alkylizing squat with baking soda… only neutralizing what’s already naturally weakly acidic.

To clean my tub just now, I used baking soda (light dusting around the tub), a clean rag, cold water, and about one squirt of eco-friendly soap. There are million brands of these vegetable-based cleaners to choose from at Vitamin Cottage, and I think I went with the cheap one by Lifetree.

It smells really yummy, too, almost as fabulous as bleach!!! It has a lemony scent, and it can be used on your body, your car, your dog, and your bathtub– and more.

So, I’m pretty pleased– so pleased I had to come down here while the bath was running so I could share this with you.

Gotta go get naked…

We had six tornadoes here in Colorado yesterday.

There are a lot of people whose homes were damaged or destroyed. I know that many of them are not going to have the money to rebuild/survive while they wait for the insurance companies to assess damage and write checks… so I figured I’d donate.

I found a link on 9News that gives us an address to mail stuff to, or an online link where you can automatically send $10. That’s what I did.

I figure that if all of us can afford $10, that’s a lot of money coming in to help.

Here’s the link! (Click on “link”)

I found a great article that tells us more about the kinds of plastics… this one is even better than the guide I last gave you all…

These videos jarred me… You need to watch this and be aware of what we’re ACTIVELY doing to our oceans.

You can watch the first video, and then to see the rest of them, click on “read the rest of this article.”

All videos can be found on the original website: www.vbs.tv.     Many thanks to the folks who opened our eyes to this!

I’ve mentioned The Great Pacific Garbage Patch in my blog before… here is a group of videos that takes you along on a trip to see what this really means.

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For some good news…

I’ve decided that I have to recycle in order to really do MY part in averting the madness that has become our daily trash routine.

It’s about time, and I figure NOW is as good a time as any to get started.

Here’s a resource for the recycling of some of the questionable stuff you may not have thought of.

The List of things you can recycle is nearly endless:

• Aerosol cans
• Adhesives
• Aluminum/ Aluminum cans
• Antifreeze
• Appliances
• Asphalt
• Automotive Products
• Automobiles
• Batteries
• Books
• Brass
• Cardboard
• Carpet & Pads
• Cleaners & waxes
• Clothes
• Computers/ printers
• Concrete
• Drums & barrels
• Eyewear
• Flammables
• Fluorescent lighting
• Freon
• Furniture
• Household hazardous waste
• Ink Jet Cartridges
• Magazines/ catalogs
• Mercury
• Motor Oil - used
• Newspaper
• Office Paper
• Oil filters
• Paint
• Pallets
• Poison
• Propane tanks
• Scrap metal
• Thermostats/ Thermometers
• Tires
• Yard waste (branches/leaves/grass/sod)

For the stuff that’s more common, you can easily drop it off at Lakewood Recycling Center. It’s at 1050 Quail St. in Lakewood, CO

They’re open 24/7; paper, recyclable plastic, recyclable metal, recyclable glass… lakewood.org

They make it pretty easy for us newbies. We don’t have to separate any of it– just drop off the following:

• Newspapers, magazines, office paper, junk mail
• Telephone books
• Aluminum, plastic, glass, tin (and more!)
• Cardboard

All of this goes into any one of those dumpsters, and it’s pretty easy to do this. I’m finding things that I would’ve never thought about… like laundry soap containers (I rinsed these out first), face wash bottles, vitamin bottles, shampoo bottles…

Here’s a link for some recycling guidelines for Louisville, CO…

Also, here’s a handy dandy link that gives you a list of things you can recycle, and then it gives you a list of places you can take them to!!!

Apparently I’m on a mission to save the world.  Uh oh, knight in shining armor complex strikes (again).   I guess the reason behind it is that my level of awareness is increasing in leaps and bounds, and in order to share it with you, I have to put down the most important pieces as quickly as they are coming to me– so that you can at least have some sort of reference to figure out where the hell I’m coming from.

In turn, those bits and pieces turn out to be my way of identifying what’s going wrong.   And as much as I don’t want to focus on what’s wrong (for lack of desire for more of what’s wrong), I still believe that you must acknowledge that things are going wrong in order to identify the solutions.   I’m not saying that I have all of the solutions– or any of them for that matter, but I do believe that there ARE solutions, and that we as a collective whole, are perfectly capable of putting our minds together and not only defining the solutions, but creating a workable game plan in order to begin BEing the solution.

“If you’re not part of the solution, you’re part of the problem.”  I don’t know if someone actually said this, or if it’s just cliche at this point.  I just know that in this situation, it’s 119% true.  I think the major problem is that we as a culture are asleep.  I believe that we need to wake up and start cleaning up our messes.  And boy, do we have a shitload of mess to address.

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I’m not surprised about Frontier filing for bankruptcy.

If the media shouts “Recession!!” often enough, we will believe them.

It’s still amazing to me that we have become SO dependent upon oil that we are allowing ourselves as a culture to collectively go bankrupt while the oil companies thrive… we’ve done this to ourselves– and we’re so reliant upon oil as a means for survival that we continue to stretch the disparity between the very rich and the growing poor.

One day, I hope we can come to our senses. Our dependency on oil has driven us to excessively pollute our air in populated areas. We continue to fill our trash heaps with plastic and non-biodegradable waste. Yes, plastics have furthered us scientifically, especially medically… I’m not saying all plastic is bad; just that we are infatuated with our wasteful gluttony to the point of having no where to put it all… we are becoming much like a caged animal, forced to step in our own excrement.

I know this reads as awfully gloomy. I don’t mean it to come across that way. What I mean to do is force myself to acknowledge what it is we’re doing here– in hopes that together we can come up with a solution.

I think the reason I’m so focused on these things because I’m passionate about what I love. I’m not passionate about things going poorly– I desperately desire good things for all of us. In affirming that, I feel like we need a solution. This is not a war against waste, but a battle cry for a new attitude.

Sorry, I know, dramatic title, not very positive.

Not to say I’m in an entirely funky mood, but I’ve just been “researching,” and I feel like now I know more, and at the same time realize the dire problems we face as a culture.

You’ve heard me mention this once or twice. What we’re doing ISN’T working.

Indeed.

So, let’s take a basic life sustaining product: no, not television… but WATER.

We drink it, and there’s controversy. Should we drink eight glasses? Or a certain number of ounces per body weight? Should we buy bottled? Or drink the city’s water?

I know, I know, over-thinking it again, are we?

Well, let’s look at it this way… we drink fluorinated water… because it’s good for our teeth. Because it’s what the dentists recommend. Because that’s what we have. We pay for our water, and we conserve it because we’re good environmentalists.

But then we hear a breath-taking report that there are pharmaceuticals in our water. We discover that there are prescription drugs– from anti-psychotics to vitamins to antibiotics to estrogen… well, there’s a whole damn lot of pharmaceuticals in our water. How’d all that junk get there? Well, it survived the treatment at the local treatment plant… stuff that we flush down the toilet along with our human excrement. The pharms got there through our urine. And don’t worry, we’re not drinking urine when we open that cold tap water– we’re drinking filtered, cleaned water. Urine is mostly water, no? Un-metabolized pharmaceuticals that left our bodies and are not caught in the filtration… It also behooves me to mention that our water supplies easily and readily become polluted by the contaminants (including carcinogens) that wash out of our food supplies– via herbicides, pesticides and fertilizers.

Does anyone see a problem with this?

Curious to know what the EPA calls contaminants?

I know I’m neurotic. I worry about my own death on a fairly frequent basis. It just seems to me that maybe I’m just not that crazy. Now, I don’t need to be all panicky and worrisome and stuff without finding out the actual threat, which I plan to do. (Suddenly organic chemistry seems much more interesting.)

I guess I just wanted to throw out there that here is a lot of stuff that we never think about– it’s SO much easier to live obliviously.

Shouldn’t you care, too?

Beware, you’re about to read my opinions about lots of different things. If you’re not comfortable reading about things you might not agree with, I would encourage you not to read on any further. If, however, you agree or disagree and have something thoughtful to add, your feedback is HUGELY appreciated. What I’m trying to do is start a conversation… get us talking about the things we’re not supposed to talk about. With that, carry on.

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