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There is a new commercial out from Discover Card that makes me very angry.  I looked for it on You Tube and couldn’t find it but let me give you the jist.

It says that it’s not a big deal to spend, spend, spend.  I believe what they say is…We are a country of consumers and that’s not a problem.  The problem is that there is just so much stuff to buy.  But maybe if credit card companies were different it wouldn’t make a difference how much stuff we bought.

Of course they are pushing their new website and their “Bright Idea” campaign, but in my opinion they are pushing people to spend more money and not think about the consequences until after they “put it on the card”.  They are saying that since their company is going to “help” you pay down your balance smarter, that it shouldn’t matter what you spend since you will be able to pay it off how you want.

I don’t have any credit cards, anymore.  I am still paying off a small balance but at the rate I am paying it, it’s gonna take me more then a year and it’s gonna cost me $150 in interest charges.  I agree it’s easy to pay with plastic.  Even now with my debit card I sometimes forget to think about the amount of the purchase that I am making but now it comes out of my checking account immediately so there is no chance of me not being able to pay it off in a month.

I know it’s hard not to want the newest and greatest thing but just like all other purchases, it affects the world around you every time you buy something.  It had to come from some plant that is producing waste and possibly toxic waste.  It had to be shipped to the store where you bought it and that truck, plane or train was pumping out air pollution and burning foreign oil.  The item that you replaced or when the item has been used up, has to be thrown out and take up room in a landfill.  If it is recycable, it will probably be shipped halfway round the world to a developing country where there are not the same safeguards and they will more then likely be exposed to chemicals that will someday kill them or at least make them very ill.

We need to pay attention to all the purchases that we make.  It’s more then the money that it costs.  It’s about the after effects.  Always ask the question…what does this really cost?  And always remember…there is more to life then stuff.

Most of you already know that I don’t really own a tv.  A year ago my husband and I made the choice to not purchase cable and get rid of our large tv.  We have a small television for playing X-Box but that gets pulled out once in a blue moon.  We really rely on our computers for our entertainment, but we still maybe only watch 3 hours of tv in an entire week.  According to WikiAnswers the average American watches 8 or more hours of television a day.  That’s a lot of tv! The main reason we stopped watching television was we realized that we we didn’t actually watch tv we surfed through all the channels at a pace that screwed with our brains.  There are several studies that have proved that constant channel surfing changes the part of the brain that controls our attention span.  Tv messes with that area of the brain to begin with but the constant changing of the picture makes it worse.

The other reason we stopped was because of all the commercials.  Did you know that a child will watch over a million commercials in their life time?  For every 40 minutes of programing, you see an additional 20 minutes of commercials.  If you watch online you see between 4 to 6 commercials and unfortunitally they are the same commercial over and over.  In your face advertising that is tempting you to forget about common sense and spend your money on things that you don’t need.  Whew…stop me before I get to far on this.

Anyway this post is about radio and not tv, but one of the main reasons why I have switched to publicly funded radio is the commercialism.   In an informal study (I counted as I listened) for every 3 songs that were played 2 commercials were heard, so about 6 times an hour there was a commercial.  Almost as many as on tv and like tv the same songs can be heard over and over again.  In another informal study, I listened to the radio at the same time each day for about an hour at a time.  To my suprise the same songs were played during that hour each day, just at different times.  Are we as Americans that dumb that we are lulled into thinking that it’s ok for programming can just be regurgitated over and over again?

I’ve switched to our Public Radio station and College Jazz station, why don’t you?  Pledge your support to your local stations instead of the large conglomerates that keep making us listen to the same 100 songs each day.  We deserve better then that!

I’ve had a couple of people email me and ask when the plastic usage pictures and posts will be back.

Well let me give it to you straight…I am ashamed of my plastic usage so I don’t really wanna show you guys anymore.  But don’t fret, I will start back this weekend.

When I shopped at the granola store it was very easy for me to not buy plastic but now that I am shopping at my local big box grocery store, I can hardly find plastic free/less replacements for the things that I normally buy.

For example…when I shopped at Wild Oats they had great organic juices in glass bottles.  At Schnucks they have one or two types of juice in glass bottles but no one in my family would drink it and paying $4.50 for a pint seems a bit unreasonable.  So to not buy large quantities of plastic, we started buying canned juice from Juicy Juice.  It’s still expensive, not as expensive as the organic juice from Wild Oats but for concentrate it’s a bit pricey. But here is the problem…aluminum cans contain a layer of plastic on the inside so the contents don’t eat through the side of the can during their long journey to your table.  So whereas it’s better to buy less plastic there is still plastic involved.

At the granola store they would wrap my deli meats and cheeses in paper and at the grocery store they will not for any reason put the deli items into anything but their own plastic baggies.  I protested but after the look that I got from the deli manager, my protest did not go any further.  I can bring my own bags (oh! I have a story to tell about a BYOB convert!) but I can’t bring a plastic container of my own to put food into?  What’s up with that?  I’m sure that there is a Health Code or something but gesh, if I’m gonna spend $6 a pound for turkey I should get to have some say as to what I take it home in.  Anyway…I’ve tried to get away from eating luncheon meats totally but it seems that my 6 year old is on a PB&J protest (that I can buy in glass) and is refusing to eat peanut butter totally.  So at least for the rest of the summer I will have to buy the luncheon meat so that the poor child doesn’t starve. I do have one nice thing to say about the butchers at the meat counter at my local Schnucks, they have stopped using the plastic baggies to wrap the chicken and are only using butcher paper.  I guess my persistence with that department has won them over to the green side!

The one thing I can’t get away from is block or shredded cheese.  I know that even Beth at Fake Plastic Fish struggled with this issue too.  Since I don’t drink milk and most of my kids don’t either, we have to get our calcium from somewhere and cheese is it.  We have cheese on our baked spaghetti, tacos, enchiladas, chili dogs, turkey burgers and especially on our pizzas.  I can’t give it up but the worst part is I have no idea if the cows that produce this cheese are happy or not.  It’s definitely not organic like the milk and eggs that I buy so it’s even worse to buy it then I originally thought!  I’m going to the Farmer’s Market this weekend .  Yeah right, I keep saying that!  Pray that they have some happy cow cheese that I can start to substitute, at least then I would only be breaking one green rule.

Of course there is always the plastic wrapping from the turkey that I buy, but I don’t really count that as bad since I buy the turkey instead of beef since we all know what cattle does to our environment…don’t we?

There is a fine line that we walk between being green and living the way a normal consumer does.  I say it’s always worth doing!

I went to the grocery store this past weekend to begin an experiment on the differences on pricing and products between the large chain grocery store and the granola store (which I realize is a chain too but there is only one here in the city).

I bought what most of what we needed and tired not to pay attention to prices because if I did the granola store would automatically lose the competition. I bought brand names and tried to stay away from plastic, but that was all but impossible. I want this experiment to show the pros and cons of both stores but especially the environmental costs.

What I do know is that I spent $155 on about weeks worth of groceries. I tried to only shop the outside isles where the best food is (fresh produce and the meat and fish counters) but I had to buy breakfast food and a couple other household staples. I actually spent $185 but about $30 of that total were non-food items that I will not count in my actual totals because those kinds of items are not bought on a weekly basis.

Next week I am going to shop at the chain store and at the Farmers Market to see what kind of difference that makes. The week after that will be at the granola store only and then the following week will be the granola store and Farmer’s Market. At the end I will compare all the pros and cons and ask you to make the decision as to where I should shop.

How is the increase in food and gas costs effecting you?

When I first started this blog, I walked around my home and looked at all that I had and scrutinized each item for it’s greeness. I started in my kitchen and the first thing I noticed was the paper napkins and paper towels. I did some some quick calculations and this is what I came up with.

If my family of 6 uses a napkin at every meal that would mean we would go through 6570 napkins in a year. Over a lifetime (75 years) that adds up to 492,750 napkins used. If it takes one tree to make 8335 pieces of paper, we are killing 59 trees in a lifetime just to wipe of hands and face. Think of that in a grander scale if there are 3 million people living in the United States, each day we are throwing away approximately 1,806,839,682 napkins. In trees killed that’s 216,777 a day.

I believe that is senseless destruction, when you can easily purchase cloth napkins that can be washed and re-used countless times. I bought 30 napkins, at about $1.50 a piece, enough to make it through the week. I bought white so they could easily be washed and non-chlorine bleached, but you can buy them in whatever color you want. Make the initial investment and not only will you be saving trees but you will be saving money in the long run.

I have a thing about my hair and it’s because at the early age of 28 I started going grey.  My mom would laugh because if I remember right she started getting greys when she weas in high school, but never the less I am too young to be grey!  Now I know what you are thinking…between the waxing and the coloring of hair when do I have time to save the world?  Well like any good superwoman I find the time to do it all…of course everything but scrub the mold in my bathroom!  BTW does anyone know how to get rid of mold without using bleach or chemicals?

I chose to get my hair colored at the salon because of two reasons:

1.  We discussed this the other day but it’s the conversation.  I love my hairdresser; she’s down to earth, is a single mom and has a teenager.  I love catching up with her every 6 to 8 weeks, we chat about our kids and the crazy things that happen in our city.  We talk about things that my husband wouldn’t understand or wouldn’t care to talk about…it’s great!   

2. If I was to buy hair coloring at the store the box would contain 3 or more pieces of plastic, if I get it done at the hairdresser they reuse the same bottle over and over again.  That’s less plastic going into the trash, however there is one draw back…the chemicals that get washed down the drain.

Now I will ask but I am pretty sure that they use an all natural or at least mostly natural hair colors.  You never smell anything toxic when you go into the salon and with the natural beauty products that they sell, I’ll assume that the color comes from the same manufacturer.  I’ll do more research on this and update you later. 

I am the “Director of First Impressions” (receptionist) at my office so I can’t afford to walk around looking like a hippie (sorry to all you hippies out there, it’s just an expression!) I have to dress and look the part, so that means I have to be a little vain and worry about my appearence.  If I sat in the back of the office and never had dealing with customers or vendors, it wouldn’t matter to me what my hair looked like, heck I would shower and wash it everyother day if that was the case. 

I think being proud of your appearence goes along with smiling when you answer the phone.  Try it…next time you are in a bad mood and the phone rings, take a deep breath and smile as you say hello, see what it does to the mood of your conversation!

The other day I talked about kitty litter and why I buy a certain brand. In that post I said that I buy my cat food from my local pet store, so you might think that I buy a locally made cat food, but that’s not the case. I buy Eagle Brand, why you ask…well let me tell you.

I started the cats on Castor and Pollux dry cat food, changing them from the Cat Chow that they grew up on and immediately the put on weight and their coats became soft and supple. I really liked the idea of the cats eating a organic food, I eat organic so why shouldn’t my cats, but there seemed to be a problem.

Several times I hear the cats coughing while they were eating, I would jump up to see what the problem was and by the time I got there the coughing would have stopped and they would be back eating again. Then one day while I was feeding them I noticed that there were very large chunks of veggies/fruits mixed in the food. Could my cats be choking on their food? I wasn’t going to take a chance of my children coming home from school and finding a dead cat on the floor next to their food bowl so I started picking the large chunks out and I never heard the cough again.

Now I am not saying that Castor and Pollux’s food is bad, it’s probably just my cats not chewing their food well enough. In fact I think the Castor and Pollux’s brand is great, plus my cats loved it. I was really concerned that the cats wouldn’t like it at all, since they had been eating Cat Chow for 18 months, but there was no problem at all.

I decided that as we got close to the bottom of the bag I would try another brand that didn’t have the large pieces in it and that’s when I walked into my local pet store. I could have gone back to Petco and bought another “natural” brand, but all the other brands were big business brands and I wanted to stay away from those. So I explained this to the lady at the Hollywood Pet Star and she introduced me to the Eagle Brand. I did some research and found that Eagle Brand is a Mom and Pop kind of place and that even though it wasn’t certified organic they only use antibiotic and hormone free chicken and there isn’t any meat by-product in the food.

The real test would be if the kitties would like the food and boy did they. In fact for a few days they would pick through the mixed food and only eat the Eagle Brand kibble. There have been no more stinky litter box issues (one had developed tummy problems on the food) and no more choking since there are no large pieces in the food.

This is not necessarily the food that I want to feed my cats, the bag is lined with plastic, but it’s a good compromise. Beth at Fake Plastic Fish was feeding her cats Pet Promise I thought I would try that but I can only by it at the granola store and that means expensive. I am already spending $35 a month just on food, I don’t think my husband would approve of much more. I do know that I won’t go back to Cat Chow. Your paying for quality and when you are paying $10 to feed for a month, you can’t be getting much quality.

What do you feed your pets? Does your attitude towards your food go along with what you give your pets?

I have been hinting for a while that I have an issue with corn based products especially corn ethanol. I haven’t really talked about it because I have been doing a lot of research on the impact of grown corn on the environment.

Here are some disturbing facts about corn and ethanol:

365: Days one person could be fed on the corn needed to fill an ethanol fueled SUV
$100 billion: Estimated size of the 2010 biofuel market.

2000-15000 gallons: Amount of biodiesel produced in one year by one acre of algae
300 gallons: Amount of ethanol produced by one acre of corn

75%: Drop in food prices from 1974 to 2005
$2.20: Corn price per bushel, January 2006
$6.00: Corn price per bushel, April 3, 2008

I try to stay away from corn based foods/products, start reading labels I bet you’ll find corn products in some pretty strange places…ketchup anyone?

This is the reason why I refuse to buy the cheap gas, it has an ethanol additive. It’s why I haven’t tried Worlds Best Cat Litter, it’s made from corn. It’s the reason that when I buy juice for my kids I buy unfiltered apple juice, it only has two ingredents and corn syrup isn’t one of them.

Have you ever thought about all the things that go into the things that you take for granted? Really investigate and pay attention to the things you buy, what environmental and personal impact do they have.

In what seems a very long time ago I discovered a detergent that contained absolutly no plastic, not even the little plastic scoop.  Well I had high hopes for the Classic Purex, but it’s just not pulling it’s weight.  Four children make for a lot of dirty clothes and the plastic free detergent option just wasn’t doing a good enough job of cleaning the clothes.  I tried adding baking soda and hydrogen peroxide to the wash but the clothes still came out dingy and the stains would still be there.  So I decided to see if there was another brand that I could try that was more of a “natural cleaner”. 

There are several biodegradable, more eco friendly, laundry detergents out there…the first one that comes to mind is Seventh Generation.  I use their dishwasher detergent and I really like it, so I tried it.  It didn’t do a bad job, it did a better job then the Purex, but I wasn’t impressed.  The second brand was Ecover it had the same result as the Seventh Generation…not bad but not fantastic. 

The Purex is only $3.99 for a box that will do about 40 loads and the Seventh Generation and Ecover were about twice that and did fewer loads, so with the extra added cost I expected a cleaning miracle. 

The next one I tried was Mrs. Meyers Clean Day it comes is several different scents and since I am a sucker for lavendar, I almost fell in love immediatly. It’s pricey but it is concentrated so it does as many load as my Purex does so I am getting more for my money versus Seventh Generation and Ecover.  And the best thing is that it works!  It gets the stains out of my napkins and leaves them smelling great.  The downside to this love affair is that the detergent is liquid so it only comes in plastic, it’s recycable but still plastic. 

I have contacted the company to see if there are refilling programs, but as far as I can tell only one of my local stores carries the Mrs Meyers and they don’t refill. 

So this is the best option that I have come up with, not the greatest option but the best I have found so far.  I will continue to look for other options…hopefully a detergent that is powder so it comes in a box and not in a plastic jug.

We have had the kitties for a couple of months now and we have gone though 4 different types of kitty litter.  One was recommended by Beth, one was recommended by my vet and the other I chose. 

The first was Swheat Scoop, made of wheat and flushable, I thought it would be a great alternative to the clay litter that the cats were raised on.  I read all the comments about the litter and the there seemed to be a theme surrounding the litter clumping and sticking to the bottom of the litter pan.  Beth didn’t have any bad things to say about it and since it came in a recycable paper bag I decided to try it.  You have to use a huge amount of this litter to keep it from sticking to the bottom of the litter box and because of that we were going through a bag every 10 days.  The cost of one bag was about $15 and spending that much every 10 days on something that I threw away seemed needless.  I didn’t like the smell much anyway.

The second one I tried was Yesterday’s News , made of recycled newspapers it seemed like a great option.  But eventhough the bag said that it was a clumping litter, it did not clump and it also was to big to filter through my scoop, so I was wasting clean litter everytime I scooped.  That litter was freecycled less then a week after I bought it.

The third was Fresh Step, big business kitty litter, but my vet recommend that I try it so I did.  It was perfumed with the worst smelling deodorant that I have ever smelled.  I would have much rathered smelled the kitty poo!  Plus the cats started smelling like the deodorant and it made me sneeze.  Plus it stuck to the bottom of the litter pan just like the swheat scoop, but when you add liquid to dirt you get mud and that’s not the nicest thing to clean from the bottom of the pan.

The fourth was one that I thought that I would never try but I did and so far I have been impressed.  The reason why I thought I wouldn’t try it is because it only comes in plastic containers, but they are refillable and recycable.  The brand that I am using now is the Petco name brand kitty litter.  The inital cost is $9.99 for the plastic container filled with litter and then every time you refill it the cost is $6.99.  You still have to use 3 to 4 inches in the pan but it’s a savings of $8 over the Swheat Scoop, I can handle that. 

I have looked at my locally owned pet store, but they carry the same brands that Petco does but they do not stock a refillable container like Petco does. So I will continue to buy their food (more on that tomorrow) from the local store and the litter from Petco.  Luckly they are less then a block from each other and the local store is next door to my grocery store, so don’t have to use any extra gas. More on this later…