Going Green in Comfort

(Image by Stuart Miles / FreeRangeStock.com ) The other day as I was cooking dinner, I came to the end of a roll of aluminum foil. I teasing tapped my daughter on her head with the cardboard tube that remained, then started to throw it in the trash. “Can I have that?” my daughter asked. “I can use it to make something.” “Sure,” I said, and handed it over. My daughter took the tube and headed off to her bedroom. Later, she reappeared, using the tube as a pole that held up one of her drawings like a flag. This is just one of the many reasons I am often in awe of my daughter. She always can often see the possibilities in an item I considered to be trash. She stops me from throwing something away at least once a month. Most of the time, it’s a box or something like those cardboard canisters that oatmeal comes in. She’ll turn it into a home for her dolls, or a fence for her toy horse, and, ocassionally, something as simple as a stick for holding up a drawing. Most days, I tos...

This smoke alarm, installed in my home some 27 years before we bought the house, gave out on the first day of 2018. At 1:50 a.m. Jan. 1, 2018, my smoke alarm decided it had had enough. It sounded off for a few seconds, long enough to wake me up, but not long enough for me to register what that noise was. I just thought it was something I had dreamed. So I rolled over to go back to sleep. And then the alarm went off again, this time for a longer duration. I was fully awake then, and so was my husband. We wandered around the house looking for something on fire — or at least smoking — and found nothing. Then the alarm went back off. Over the next few hours, the alarm, which is hardwired into our house, would go off every 20 minutes or so for several seconds, then go back out. About four hours later, we were both feeling pretty confident there was no fire. My husband turned off the breaker to the smoke alarm and we got an hour or two of sleep. The next day, we bought a...

Photo by Unsplash / FreeRangeStock.com It's cold outside, making me crave soup. So, one day last week, I ran by the store to pick up a couple cans of hearty soup to take for my work lunch. Knowing I'd need spoons — and in spite of the potential dangers associated with plastics that I wrote about two weeks ago — I wandered over to the plasticware and contemplated buying a box of spoons. It just seems more convenient to be able to toss the spoon when I'm done. But as I stood there, I didn't like the ones the store had for sale, and I couldn't shake the nagging feeling that if I bought them, I'd be going against what I felt I should do. After hemming and hawing over the decision, I finally left without buying them, drove across the street to Dollar General and bought a pack of three metal spoons for $1. Not only was the decision more eco-friendly, it was also cheaper. The smallest pack of plastic spoons was about $1.50. In retrospect, I don't know why...