Per popular demand, the list of options discussed at the Lazy Environmentalist workshop I taught today at the Grove. Feel free to expand on these ideas, as I’d like to expand on it even more.

Note: Some of these ideas are ridiculous on purpose, but they are all fairly valid.

Part 2
Discussion: Lazy Environmentalism

- Forget to wash until you have a full load of dishes or laundry
- Let your dog wash dishes first, less water usage
- Pee in the shower
- Don’t flush after you urinate, this can be done several times before flushing
- Don’t shower everyday
- Shower with a friend!
- Don’t put up Christmas Lights (or a tree with lights), or put up a small tree. Use LED lights if needs be.
- Wrap with newspaper instead of wrapping paper
- Don’t buy gifts (no contributing waste or spending needless money)
- Don’t send cards (same as above)
- Hang up anything you normally would after washing and drying except don’t dry them.
- Stop the dishwasher before the drying cycle. Do it at night and they can dry while you sleep.
- If it’s not dirty, stained or smelly, wear it again. Got a spot? Clean the spot and wear it again.
- Use that semi-dirty shirt laying on the table to clean up the beer you just spilled, instead of papertowels.
- Sour Orange or lemon juice? Dump it in the toilet or shower…flush or rinse…sometime. Helps clean it up.
- Don’t paint your nails
- Throw old chips and bread outside instead of in the trash
- Don’t bother cooking the meat for your meals
- Don’t wash your car, wait for the rain
- Forget to turn on the lights
- Sleep more and watch TV less
- Cook extra for dinner and take it for lunch instead of worrying about going out somewhere to eat
- Don’t preheat the oven, just let it start cooking early
- Don’t buy clothes that require dry cleaning
- Set up power-saving modes for your computers so you can forget to turn them off
- Don’t drive anywhere, just stay home and lay in the sun
- Don’t dry or style your hair, just sweep it up or brush it out and be on your way. This saves electricity and from having to buy plastic bottled chemicals

This weekend was fairly jam-packed, and I felt like I got little accomplished.

Friday: Work took us out to Dave and Buster’s in Bethesda by charter bus. We were fed lots of yummy foods and given 2 hours worth of “points” to spend on various arcade games. This place is apparently like a Chuck E Cheese for adults. I took my sister with me to work Friday so she could go, and I think she had a lot of fun. I had a decent amount of fun, though two events stick out in my mind more than most.

While playing skeet ball(?), which was incidentally the first game I tried, a man and his two young sons were playing to my left. After a few shots he tapped me on the shoulder and said “Excuse me, but you elbowed my son in the eye.” I looked down and saw his son (who looked about crying and holding his eye. I apologized because I felt really bad about it, and finished out my game. Shortly after he came up to me again and said “Actually, apparently it was his brother that did hit him.” I didn’t really say anything back at the time, but later when I thought about it I was kinda pissed. Find out the truth before you go around accusing people of that shit.

The other was on the ride home, apparently folks were drunk enough that my giggle had them rolling in laughter. Which of course makes me giggle even more, so it was an amusing series of giggling and laughing.

Saturday I woke up with a large muscle pulled in the back of my neck that started at the base of my skull and wrapped back around my left shoulder. I don’t know what caused it, but it prevented me from doing much of anything Saturday like I wanted.

Today I went to the Grove to teach a workshop on Lazy Eco-Conscious Decisions, which followed a viewing of “An Inconvenient Truth”. They didn’t necessarily relate to one another except that they were both about the environment. The workshop went well, except I kept getting interrupted, and had several requests to pause the movie for discussion. I would have rathered the discussion came afterwards, and I certainly don’t like people interrupting me while I’m talking. It really doesn’t surprise me that we have a hard time getting people to teach workshops at the Grove.

In other recent news, I started an experiment of driving 55mph everywhere on Jun 13th to see how much I’d save on gas. So far I seem to at least get an extra day of driving out of my tank, but it will be difficult to sum up the savings without some accurate calculation which I just don’t have the time or data for. I may look at my expenses on gas in MS Money, but even that fluctuates simply because it depends on how often I go to the Grove, or how many days we have off that month for vacation or holiday. Still, I’d like to think I’m seeing a small improvement in my gas mileage. Driving down the Grove still takes a quarter tank of gas, though.

Today’s accomplishments:

Woke up at 6am and gave my dad his Fathers Day Gifts. I got him book on birds that also has an electronic device attached to it that gives the sounds the birds make, and I also got him a new garden hose since the one we’ve been using is um…..as old as me (28 years or so) and the duct tape is no longer holding it together.

Moved everything out of another portion of my room, vacuumed and scrubbed the carpet in that section.

I went through the storage trunk that was there and purged some more items, and well as stuffed a few items that were cluttering my room in there for safe keeping (such as those witchy barbies).

Went through some of my storage drawers of incense and candles and found a few things to donate to the Grove auction next weekend. Items such as a set of glass runes, some tapestries, small glass bottles, a quartz pendulum of my sister’s etc.

Cooked my dad some organic homemade meatless spaghetti with mushrooms and garlic bread for his fathers day meal.

Scrubbed the bathroom.

Found more items I’m going to list on ebay for sale. Such as metal lunchboxes, my old chucks, some knives, etc.

Made some bath salts out of some of the massage oil I made last weekend. Later on I might take a candle lit bath with them to get rid of some of today’s grime.

Posted Grove Advertisements for Midsummer next weekend.

Gave my hair a slight trim

Genealogy Breakthrough
My mom did a search and found my genealogy site (I figured she would eventually, and that’s okay), so she called me up to ask about it. This resulted in actually an almost 2 hour long conversation about genealogy in general, and her emailing me several .doc files with family information. She’s apparently willing to share the rest as well, she just doesn’t have it all in electronic format.

That’s a pretty significant breakthrough, considering my mom and I are like fire and water and have no relationship what-so-ever. Perhaps the Genealogy research will mend some of that. As much as the idea used to make me sick to my stomach before, I’m reaching the point where I may be willing to forgive some of her past actions, so long as I don’t forget them. The last two times I’ve seen her she’s been in pretty bad shape physically, and it must be an awful feeling to feel like you are dying alone, no matter who you are.

This weekend we held a Massage Oil workshop at the Grove. Keep in mind the Grove doesn’t have air conditioning and a good portion of the house is very exposed to the sun. So playing in oil proved rather interesting with the heat

It was actually a lot of fun, and I really enjoyed it. I’d love to see the workshop presented at the Grove again when it is cooler out.

We went over base oil mixtures, Vitamin E as a preservative (it’s also good for scarring), and maintenance of oils. We also got a few recipes of different mixtures to try out at another time.

Then we got to make our own with essential oils that we brought for the workshop. I wanted to try a white sage massage oil, and then a patchouli and vanilla mixture. The Patchouli and Vanilla turned out awesome, and I’m going to be wearing it quite a bit I think just for the scent. I tried to make another batch later but ran out of Vanilla so I will pick some up at the market this week.

The white sage didn’t turn out as nice because it was being overpowered by the other scents in the oils. I’ll try to pick up some more white sage oil and see if additional oil will help. Fortunately I only tried this in a small amount of base oil so it’s not much of a loss if it just doesn’t work out.

I also want to try a mint and vanilla oil at some point.

Here are some of my silly hoarding habits that I am trying to break:

1. Two large “Autumn Lodge” Yankee candles that I bought because the scent was discontinued and I loved it so much. I bought them probably 2 years ago and haven’t burned them. So it’s like I have a big jar of stuff to smell once in a while, but what purpose does that serve?

I may wait till winter to burn them, because it -is- a winter scent. But there’s really no reason for me to just hold onto the jar and smell it once every couple months.

2. Secret Spell Barbies.
These barbies came out in I think 2002-2003-ish around the Harry Potter craze when it first got, well..crazy. They were basically witch barbies, 3 of them, and they had their own spellbook etc. However they were removed from the shelves by VERY angry parents because it was said they were demonic. I happen to have all 3 in mint condition still in the boxes. I still have trouble convincing myself that I don’t need them, because they are pretty cool. This one may take some time.

3. More books that I haven’t read than books that I have.
I made a decision to stop buying books until I’ve read all the ones I have (unless it’s on a particular topic I can’t research elsewhere). I’ve just got too many that have been sitting around collecting dust. Fortunately I’ve purged maybe 4/5’s of my book collection.

4. Rocks. Rocks were a major obsession of mine when I worked at the Rock and Gem shop back in 2001/2002. So much that I literally have mounds of rocks and crystals. I’m pretty attached to them, and will probably always have a lot of them. But the collection does need to be weeded out because really all they do is sit there and take up surface space. Even when I get my own house, spreading out all of these rocks would still take up too much surface space and disrupt the energy too much.

5. Candles. I have a lot of candles, maybe drawer full. I don’t actually buy new candles, I just don’t burn them that much. Tealights seem to be easier and more efficient to use, so I generally stick to those. But I should start burning candles I already have access to.

6. Magazines/Catalogs. I’ve been doing great with this one, but I still have more magazines to go through. I was saving a pile of them because they had articles I wanted to scan, but then other things would interrupt and they’d start piling up.

I think that’s pretty much it. Detachment from material possessions is a pretty intense thing, and I’m glad I can acknowledge where problems lie so I can work towards getting them to a manageable level. Plus having surface space makes breathing so much nice.

“Many purchases these days are a waste. They are simply people buying things they don’t need with money they don’t have to impress people they don’t like.”

I had my first dentist appointment in 10 years this morning. It was much like I expected it to be, though I wasn’t expecting to have a filling done right away, I figured I’d have to make a separate appointment for that. So that was pretty convenient.

They have these new things now (new as in, I don’t think they had them 10 years ago) where they can put in white resin fillings instead of the crappy mercury/silver ones that are noticeable. They asked me which I wanted (wtf, who would choose the crappy silver ones?), and the white resin looks pretty swank and natural. I imagine it doesn’t hold up as well as the metal(?) but I haven’t researched that part yet.

I do have other fillings I’d like to have redone in the white resin, since from what I’ve googled, they seem to be the more “healthier” choice (as far as, lack of Mercury). Of course it would cost some money to have this done, but if it means getting metal out of my mouth, then I honestly feel it’s worth the price. Again having the HSA really helps in situations like these.

My face was still numb until about 20 minutes ago, and I felt like I was talking like Rocky Balboa. Actually they had to give me two doses of Novocaine because once they started drilling after the first dose, I could start to feel the drill pain.