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...

Plastic water bottle. (Photo by Sandra Trajkovska / FreeRangeStock.com ) Until recently, I thought the only things I have to worry about with plastic are its effect on the environment and that it might contain bisphenol A (BPA). So when I was shopping for baby products when I was pregnant with my daughter, I made sure to check that everything I bought for her was BPA-free. I didn't know why BPA was bad, but I knew I should avoid it. So I did. But, just last week a link to a 2014 Mother Jones article called, "The Scary New Evidence on BPA-Free Plastics," came up in my Facebook feed. The article outlines why BPA is bad for your health — it mimics estrogen, which is a vital hormone in the right amounts, but in too big or too small of a dose can negatively effect development of the brain and other organs. Babies (including those in utero) and young children are especially susceptible to the problems of BPA because they're still developing. So, whew! Good t...

I don't have a programmable thermostat in my home, but I know the benefits of turning down the temperature when your home is empty. It can mean more money in your bank account and is kinder to the environment. I can get behind that. The challenge for me is remembering to make that adjustment each day before I head out the door to work. And when I do remember, quite often, my husband and I will walk around the house for days, bellyaching about how cold our house is, worrying that our heater has crapped out and wondering how we could afford to replace it. Then one of us will look at the thermostat and realize we never turned it back up. But I want to have a few more dollars in my pocket each month. I want to do a little more to reduce my carbon footprint. So I've set my phone to alert me each day at the same time that I need to turn the thermostat down. If I forget to turn it back up later, so be it. It's for the best in the long run. We are a particip...

Merelize / FreeRangeStock.com One of my favorite memories of childhood was going to the library with my mom. As soon as we walked in, I could smell the books. It wasn't something we got to do often, which made it even more special. I loved and still love being surrounded by books. In the first five years or so my husband and I were married, the two of us could easily drop $100 at Borders or Barnes and Noble or Books-a-Million in a single afternoon. There was nothing like roaming through the stacks and finding an author or title that you hadn't heard of before but still piques your interest. Online book retailers have never held the same magic for me. There is no equivalent for finding your next read by accident because the color or title or font on a dust jacket just happened to catch your eye. And then there's the joy of being able to flip through to see how many pages you have left in a chapter. Hitting the "Next" button on your e-reader just isn...

(Photo by Eduardo Bogosian / FreeRangeStock.com ) Where I work, we used to have good, quality paper towels in the restrooms to use after washing our hands, but as a cost-saving measure three or four years ago, someone higher up the chain than me decided that thinner towels were the way to go. The problem, though, is that they're so much thinner than instead of using one towel, I now need three to get my hands completely dry. I wash my hands, then wave one hand in front of the dispenser, which has a motion sensor, to get it to roll out a towel. I rip that towel off with one hand and right away wave the other hand to get a second towel to roll out while I dry my hands as well as I can with the first towel. Then I throw away the first towel, rip off the second and wave my hand again for towel No. 3. With that towel, I finish drying my hands then use it as a buffer between my hands and whatever germs might be lingering on the door handles as I exit. When management fir...