Guest Post on Just Move Monday for the Zaftig Chicks

Over the past two months I've been doing probably a million, bajillion things, but one of the less-stressful ones has been to read some of the blogs on the fat-o-sphere feed.

That's how i came to know of Bianca & Sylvia, the Zaftig Chicks.

As a way to fight the stress of the past two months, i've been hot-yoga-ing a lot, and when the girls asked if anyone wanted to guest-contribute a blog post, it seemed like a nice opportunity to write about my practice. You can check it out here.

Meanwhile, although I haven't been posting anything here, I HAVE been tweeting, and those tweets relate to green things, including the chickens (now there are 15!). The garden has been producing the first tomatoes of the season, and my belly is READY to give them a home... I'll definitely share more as Dallas' harvests come in.

I've been doing a little "activist" stuff, too. My friend Molly and I went to check out the new TN headquarters of Repower America and then I went with a couple strangers to visit the offices of the two TN senators to tell them that I support the ACES act.

ALSO - I give a hearty thumbs-up to the Murfreesboro toothpaste I got from The Green Wagon, as well as the castile soap shampoo (i can't remember the name of it) that you can buy by the ounce (!). They'll be opening their East Nashville location oh-so-very soon, so you'll have 100% more opportunities to buy green!

Meanwhile, think good thoughts for me as I embark upon a quest for better living through altering my chemical composition with the help of the Pharmaceutical-Industrial Complex :(

Green Remodel phase 2: bathrooms & painting

Obviously this remodel is getting to me - three days late on posting! Last week we tore up the carpeting in the back bedrooms. It was only 2 years old, and with the exception of about 5x11 feet in one room, was clean and totally usable. I put in on Freecycle and within 4 hours, found someone to come get it that same night! Freecycle is AWESOME.

Anyway, we are now laying the bamboo flooring, so my mind is of course looking forward to the next project: bath fixtures, toilets, countertops + sinks, and painting!

First of all, i did not know it, but you can replace the face of a shower fixture without actually having to install a completely new set-up. I was looking at something like this, but then decided that, since the plumbing is perfectly fine, it would be better to look to replace the rusty facing on the shower fixtures. We're still looking for a place to buy them.

As for the toilets, I think this might be my favorite 'green' item of the moment - a dual-flush (or "dual flow" or "european") toilet. These toilets let you use only a little bit of water if a big flush isn't necessary. This is so much better than letting something "mellow"! This should really be a visible 'green' upgrade, so I'm anxious to see if people like it. (if you search eBay for "dual flush toilet", bunches will come up - I think we're going to buy this one)

On to the countertops... we're still not sure what we're going to be replacing the bathroom sink countertops with. There are three options: silestone (what's in the kitchen), granite (a piece from the salvage yard), or "vetrazzo". Vetrazzo is the brand name (like Kleenex) for a concrete + glass slab. We are in the process of getting an estimate from 3D Concrete Design down in Murfreesboro. The concept is really cool - use recycled glass and concrete to make a really stunning, unique countertop. Check out their site for an idea of what i'm talking about.

On top of the countertops, we're going to have vessel sinks, the kind that sit on top of the countertop like a bowl. They have perfect ones at Southeastern Salvage, but they didn't come with the fixtures (which are insanely expensive at Home Depot), so we bought them off eBay instead.

Lots of 'green' stuff is about being healthy, and the paint we're going to use is more on the 'healthy' side than the truly green side. Dubbed "low VOC" (VOC meaning "volatile organic compounds"), it will smell less and release fewer harmful chemical compounds. Low-VOC paint is new - not recycled (which you can get but isn't good for interior surfaces) - but it is specifically formulated to not have that "off-gassing" effect that a lot of products have. Check out this article for more information.

So, that wraps up today's remodeling post - I'm sure there's more to come, as we are neck-deep in jazzing this place up. Next post, I'll talk about keeping your body healthy while doing a remodel - not an easy feat in many places, where demolition can be quite a rough ride!

Happy Birthday to Danielle - quoted in the Tennessean!

So they didn't directly plug this blog, but in an 11/5 story on "Eco-Vocab," the Tennessean quoted me, "one Nashvillian, who blogs about green living"!

Check it out here.

I like the question she asks at the beginning: "What if Al Gore suggests you reduce your carbon footprint? Or Leonardo DiCaprio asks about your plans to live off the grid?"

If Leo ever asks me ANYTHING, I guarantee my response will include "hummahnna-hummahnna..."

There's an AWESOME "green glossary" they provide as well (in the right-hand sidebar), with terms like "greenwashing" and "off the grid."

Not only that, but I'm keeping the conversation going over at the Green Shopping forums on the Tennessean's website - check it out; there's more green talk than you can shake a stick at!

Sincere apologies for the 3-week hiatus!

A lot has gone on in my greening little world in the past three weeks, chickadees!

First, Vanderbilt Homecoming on Oct. 13, wherein we suffered a devastating loss to UGA (yes, Vandy did lose, but there are many of us in Commodore Nation who are loathe to say that UGA won...). The loss, I am sad to say, depressed me for longer than just the weekend.

BUT - I was lifted from my depths of despair by GreenerNashville.org.
I'm entering into a partnership with them! This blog will be moving to their site eventually (I'm not sure about the timeframe, but I will certainly keep y'all updated).

This is so incredibly exciting, I can barely contain myself.
See, way-back-when (ha. ha. 7 weeks ago... can you see the computer screen shimmy like a bad Saved-By-The-Bell flashback?), when I said

When I started looking for resources to help me, I didn't find much. Either I'm not looking in the right places or there's just nothing there... but I hope that this blog will ultimately provide a resource for anyone wishing to get a little greener here in Music City.

I hadn't found GreenerNashville.org! So when they contacted me, you can imagine how thrilled I was. People who were already set up to do what I had hoped to do with livegreennashville.com! And - despite my tendency to go very lizard-brainy on someone who beats me to a punch - I wasn't at all jealous. Here's the thing - GreenerNashville and I were made for each other. I hadn't found them in my googling because they don't have much text content, so their SIO was low and I never dug deep enough to find them. Now, hopefully, my rambling little writings can help them - and being over there, more readers will find me. What a grand way to feed my own ego while being a part of something utterly cool!

I feel hip! I feel groovy! And I am exceptionally excited to embark upon a real writing gig once again.

So, my charge to you, my few-and-faithful readers - tell people about GreenerNashville.org. In a very perfect world, I will be popular enough to garner some advertising dollars so that I can.... shhhhhhh... afford to be a writer.

Anyway, that's the long and short of why I was gone for so long. I was talking with Moses and Anthony over at GreenerNashville, and I was plotting the next year of this blog. I suddenly have so much to share with y'all, I don't know what thread of thought to pick up first. I'm going to try to lay a groundwork of ideas to start from so that I'm not throwing too much at y'all at once - check out my first post about the Tragedy of the Commons, and my previous post about Economies of Scope vs. Economies of Scale. They are, admittedly, some heavy, very "macro" ideas, but I wanted to throw them out there so that I can build off of them from here. I feel like, right now, my three very philosophical cuds to chew are the latter two, as well as what I'll be writing about in my next post - Stockholders vs. Stakeholders and why I'm excited about the idea of a B-Corporation.

So, I'll be back this Friday, October 26. I can't wait!

Hillsboro Recycling center rocks! And Keep America Beautiful is maybe not so awesome after all

Back when I was working at a little community newspaper down in Williamson County, I was also living in The Gardens at Hillsboro Village. Both were themselves follies of post-graduate youth... but reading No Impact Man today made me think of another folly of that time - my resistance to recycling.

My time at the newspaper as a writer, listings/calendar editor and web editor coincided with the time I lived with my first after-college roommate - a guy who had the attitude that recycling was the status-quo and not recycling was, frankly, odd. I, on the other hand, could have cared less. The apartment complex had a dumpster, and after walking down three flights of stairs to empty any trash we had, I was unwilling to go further. But he was insistent, so we had a bin in our kitchen to collect recyclables, and our ignorance of the area had us driving 15-20 minutes to what we thought was the nearest recycling facility (Charlotte Center by the Strike-n-Spare) . This drive did not help my it's-way-too-much-effort attitude about the whole thing. When that roommate and I parted ways, so did I and the recycling bin.

Still, I continued to moderate calendar listings at the paper, which happened to be chock-full of community/government-sponsored events. The city and county governments were really good about sending in event listings and such - we never had to track them down. So there was a steady stream of these events, as well as a large quantity, and at one point there was a glut of events run by Keep Williamson Beautiful. Maybe it was around Earth Day or something. Anyway, there were opportunities for free shredding, free disposal of paint/gas/oil, and common-area clean-ups. The sheer amount of the events, I suppose, is what stuck in my mind, and I was left with the rather passive impression that Keep America Beautiful - the KWB parent organization, was a good thing. I didn't think too much about it - it seemed like the KWB events were good things, even if they bored me... I wasn't really into the whole community-togetherness thing anyway.

And I said all of this to address two things that occurred to me today.

First, I was surprised when I read this post on No Impact Man this morning. Basically, it talks about how
"...bottling and canning corporations promoted individual environmental action back in the 70s as a way to shirk their corporate responsibilities. Beverage industry interests told us all to clean up our own garbage through a front organization, Keep America Beautiful (KAB), so they wouldn’t have to."

You know, it's this sort of stuff that feeds my cynicism and sadness about capitalism and, well, people in general. I want to beat my fists against a wall in frustration over the failure of people to just try to Do Good! Why can't they simply try to respect themselves, their fellow man and their environment? Why don't they believe, at least a little, in karma? ::sigh:: I always end this train of thought by coming to the conclusion that all I can do be responsible for my own actions and choices - All I can do is all I can do.

Yesterday, I took the recycling over to the Hillsboro Recycling Center in Green Hills (check this site out for info on where you can drop off recycling). It's back behind Hillsboro High School on Hillmont Dr. (off Glen Echo), and there are not only recycling dumpsters, but there's a Goodwill collection truck there. I will admit, part of why I have started recycling is because of this center. It's super convenient! However, the other reason is because of my relatively recent preoccupation with being a little bit green... and one of the things that encourages me to at least try is Colin's blog. The point here is that the Hillsboro Recycling Center is AWESOME! Going there actually renews my commitment to recycle what I can. It's so nice that, in a community where I don't get the feeling there's much environmental awareness, there's this wonderful recycling center.