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 :(

egg on my face...

Well, first of all, if you knew all the details, you would forgive me for being such a slacker about posting. Trust me, you would not want to read any blogging I might have done over the past three weeks!

BUT...

I'm feeling a bit perkier now, and I have something to share with you all - which is also the cause of a bit of embarrassment on my part (because I haven't updated like I should).

I've been named a Runner Up for Greenest Greek by my sorority's magazine, Anchora!!!
Check me out... along with all the other Green DGs!!! Part of what makes me green is this blog, and since I haven't been updating like I normally would... well, you can see how it's kind of embarrassing.

Anyway, I promise that I haven't left green-dom behind, just put it on pause for a while.
My latest project is figuring out where to recycle in Murfreesboro.

Also, I just finished reading Skinny Bitch (they have a website, too), and I'm not quite transformed into a vegan yet, but I have definitely stopped eating all artificial sweeteners (the phrase that made me buy the book even though I'm on a Skinny Wallet diet right now? "When methyl alcohol, a component of aspartame, enters your body, it turns into formaldehyde. Formaldehyde is toxic and carcinogenic (cancer-causing). Laboratory scientists use formaldehyde as a disinfectant or preservative. They don't fucking drink it."). That's my first step. Next step is cutting out dairy (chapter 5).

Anyway, it's "fall hell" right now at my job, so this is all I can manage... but yay for being a Green Greek and yay for trying to be a skinny bitch!

Bovine Ambition

I want to be exactly like Alexe P. van Beuren.

Check out her latest column in the Oxford Eagle:

Bovine Ambition

Outside my study window lives the only sign of my agricultural ambitions: a fifteen by twenty plot of raised beds, including a pre-existing boxwood, and forty-one heirloom tomato plants.

Thirty-nine, come to think of it. The blight got two that I ripped out yesterday.

I am twenty-five years old and there are days when I want nothing more than to rise at dawn, don overalls, and pad forth from my sleeping family to go deal with chickens, fruit trees, a vegetable garden, and yes, a cow. A milk cow, to be exact.

Somehow, the whole town knows of my ambitions. Yesterday at the farmers' market, the husband of an acquaintance asked me how my pursuit of cow-dom was going... (Click to read more)

This chick is soooooooo awesome. If she weren't already married I'd be hightailing it down to Mississippi with a ring in one hand and a cow in the other.

Urban Dictionary

I've known about Urban Dictionary for some time now, but it was only recently that I realized that they, too, had a Word of the Day email (just like dictionary.com).

Today's WOTD delighted me...

carbon guilt n. The feeling of guilt for using too much carbon, e.g. too much air travel, driving to the corner shop in the car, etc.
'Man, I have to fly to Zurich for the second time this month'
'Whoa, you must have some major carbon guilt over that'

"I hit a dog..."

While I'm mildly ashamed to admit that I watched Jackass, I will staunchly and loudly proclaim that the one scene where they rent a car, modify it and then crash it was hysterical - mostly because when they return it, they say "I hit a dog." Not that hitting a dog is funny, but, you know.

Anyway, thanks to xkcd.com for another idea of what to do with a rental car...

I want some of these

Ideal Bite, an enewsletter I subscribe to, is selling bags with their logo.
They are super-cute... when i have some cash to throw at those folks, I'm going to buy some.

For now, go subscribe to their newsletter - my designer friend Molly put me onto them and they are sassy and funny and ALWAYS topical! Love 'em!

New Year's Resolution - stop whining and start acting

I'm pretty sure that, with my hamburger-part-2 post, I hit rock bottom.

I was pretty depressed about price versus cost.
Probably, this depression came from the fact i was eating crap (read: free crap).
I feel SO MUCH BETTER when i eat fruit for breakfast and spinach salads for dinner!

Anyway, just about the time I hit "publish" on that post, I started reading Going Green: "A Step-A-Day Program for Lazy Suburbanites". It's a blog by a mom who is making one change a day toward going green.

WOW. She is so positive, ambitious, creative, and driven! One change a day! Reading through all of her past posts, I have decided to get busy doin' instead of being busy whining.

Thanks to an awesome Christmas present from my brother, a "Living Green" page-a-day calendar, I think I'll have an easier time of keeping perspective on all of this.

After all, I already do some pretty green stuff without really thinking about it... so perk up, D!

- I don't use paper towels anymore (still using toilet paper, though... there are some people who are much braver than I am!)
- I don't run the water hardly at all when i brush my teeth
- The heat hasn't been on all winter, and I've used the fireplace like 3 times.
- I'm not showering and/or washing my hair as much. I find that, when I'm doing *nothing* but sitting all day (i.e. not going out for dinner with friends or going to a meeting during lunch), I don't need to shower every day. My day job really is conducive to not showering as often, so if all I'm doing in a day is going to work and back, i can shower every other day. Washing my hair every other day has become so much of a habit that I forgot to wash my hair the other morning on an "on" day! It didn't make too much of a difference, really, so i might need to re-evaluate the every-other-day thing.

Stuff I still consciously think about:

- Recycling. Some days, I just want to throw stuff "away". Since I'm in the middle of a giant house purge (moving soon, maybe?), I'm getting rid of a lot of stuff, and it's very tempting to just throw it in the trash. The sheer volume is overwhelming. I have been able to set some stuff aside for eBay, and recycle some parts of things (cereal boxes, for example) - other stuff (damn those envelopes with plastic windows!) seems like it takes too much mental energy to figure out if it can be recycled.
- Turning off lights. I have to consciously make myself turn off lights, because I'm so lazy I'd really rather not - so it's still not a habit. But I'm getting there!
- The dogs' mess. The topic of Georgia being on reusable puppy pads deserves a post of its own - but suffice to say that, though I've got it set up so that cleaning up after the dogs is relatively green, there are still parts of it that are hard. When we travel, Georgia uses reusable pads and I use paper towels to clean up messes. When I give them baths, I use too much water. The Green Pets Initiative is still a work in progress! More on that later.
- Treating my car gently. It really requires presence of mind to maximize my use of the Prius. Easing up on acceleration, turning it off when i run inside somewhere, driving at 60 on the highway instead of 75, using the windows instead of the a/c - all of this really takes concentration for me.
- Buying stuff. Christmas had me thinking about how much stuff I and my family buy. It's really quite staggering. Even with my recent reductions, we're still going through SO MUCH STUFF - which creates trash, of course. I did some reading over the past week about "green" Christmas presents - buying handmade, giving sustainable gifts (events or services rather than things), and one of the items I stumbled on (I can't find it now) was about how one woman asked for things like having a family member take one less shower a week - this was a gift to her because it not only helped her in her pursuit of being greener, but it also meant that if she wanted to take a longer shower every once in a while, she could rest easy knowing that someone else was using less water so she could enjoy that luxury.

So, moving forward into 2008, I'm very optimistic. I don't expect to ever fully change my stripes (my packrat tendencies are primal, somehow), but developing new habits is good practice for life as well as "living green". The page-a-day calendar will help me stay focused on my desire to develop good habits, which is what I hope 2008 will be about.

icanhascheezburger.com

If you guys haven't seen this site, you should definitely check it out.
Usually, they make me laugh out loud, which is quite a feat.
However, one that I saw today sort of took the wind out of my giggly sails...




This is funny because of the original "lolrus" post on icanhascheezburger, but it sort of took a serious turn i wasn't prepared for... sheesh.

FreeRice.com

Thanks to Robyn Bradley for showing me the site FreeRice.com, where you play a never-ending vocabulary game that, thanks to the advertising at the bottom, donates rice to UN hunger efforts.

For a vocab nut like me, this is pretty addictive - and I also like the pretty bamboo bowl that fills with rice as you play. I'm putting a banner link to it on this blog as soon as I figure out how to not break the template by doing so.

If you're bored at work or studying for the SAT/ACT/PSAT/GRE/etc., it's a great little site!