Thinking outside the bottle

I'm posting at The Greenists today about a company and a college freshman who are thinking outside the bottle when it comes to packaging beverages. Check it out!

Some green-tinted housekeeping

Two things ...

1. I did actually write a blog post yesterday with a New York theme, but you have to go to The Greenists to find it.

2. I think I'm officially ready to move my blog to another host site and possibly even do a redesign. I am so incredibly sick of moderating spam comments that my head is likely to explode. In the haste to keep spam comments off my blog, I've accidentally rejected several comments from Modern Friends, which is contrary to the point.

Which means I need some suggestions from y'all along the lines of A. What blogging platform would you suggest (must do a better job of regulating spam than Blogger does) and why and B. Who would you suggest that could both move my entire blog from Blogger to a new platform and do a redesign.

I can't say you'll see any changes around here anytime soon because I've got a lot on my plate, but I would like to get the ball rolling BEFORE my head explodes, because I figure it will be easier that way.

Capilene love

Today I post at The Greenists, where I talk about my new love for all things Capilene by Patagonia.

And speaking of The Greenists, the original mastermind of the site, Allie Larkin, is an amazing writer and dedicated dog lover has a new website up as she prepares for the release of her novel Stay. Check it out!

Bring your compost inside

P to the S: I did my monthly post at The Greenists, this one about how you can compost inside, which could be seriously useful as the temperatures are like eleventy billion below zero right now.

Sending green wishes

I'm blogging at The Greenists today about how to send green wishes this holiday season. Check it out, and leave me some of your own tips on how to keep your holidays green.

Green your Halloween

I've got a few posts brewing in my head, but I worked pretty much all weekend, so I'm just now getting caught up on life again. In the mean time, check out a post I did yesterday for The Greenists on greening your Halloween celebrations.

Also, while we're on the topic of Halloween ... I don't know that I'm going to get to fully celebrate Halloween this year because I have to work that day (I just don't know whether I'm working during the day or at night). Whether I'm free Halloween night is probably going to impact how much effort I put into a costume this year, but I'm looking for ideas. What are you planning on being and what's been the best costume you ever wore?

Tips on repurposing

One of my favorite things about Real Simple is the section where they suggest new uses for old household items. My all-time-favorite tip is to use spent toilet paper and paper towel tubes to hold unused extension and computer cords.


Here's Real Simple's New Uses for Old Things Hall of Fame. There's even a link for repurposing food items as cleaners.

Giving the gift of green cleaning

And a P.S. to the early post from today. I'm also guest posting at The Greenists today about giving the gift of green cleaning. Check it out!

(Wow, did I just post twice in a day? In other news, hell is now freezing over.)

Programming notes

I think I forgot to tell everyone that because I don't have time to blog here at The Modern Gal, I've decided to take on another part part-time blogging duty.

Seriously, I couldn't say no when Allie and Courtney, the green gurus behind the old Allie's Answers site asked me to be a contributor to their new and improved TheGreenists.com site. I've been reading Allie's blog for nearly two years now, and it has always been my favorite green blog because she does being green realistically, suggesting easy ways to change your habits. And Allie and Courtney are just plain awesome. So are the rest of The Greenists, many of whom you might recognize from around the blogsphere. You can follow us on Twitter here.

Anyway, I'll be writing once a month on green topics loosely related to the home. You can read one of my posts today (it's not really about the home, but it's about a green product I've gotten attached to in the last few weeks).

AND IN OTHER PROGRAMMING NEWS ... I'm moderating all comments now, y'all. I've gotten a buttload of spam comments in recent weeks, and I'm getting super-sick of them. I'm doing my best NOT to have to go to the obnoxious word verification system, so either until the current wave of spammers go away (each spam comment has been very similar) or I get sick of approving each comment, the moderation is on. Don't freak out when your comment doesn't immediately show.

That is all for now. Hopefully there will be another post later today.

Pregnancy: be aware

I'm sure my officemate didn't know what to think today when I nearly fell out of my chair from laughing so hard at an e-mail I received urging me to celebrate May as 'Pregnancy Awareness Month.'

'Ok,' I said to officemate, 'how do you think I should celebrate it? How about I announce to the world that I'm aware that I'm not pregnant?'

So that's just what I did thanks to Twitter, and I got some hilarious responses* ...

-- It's a month for women on those TLC shows about women who don't know they're pregnant until labor begins. D'oh (@AC_Ent)
-- Perhaps they know something we don't. Craving ice cream? Pickles? :) (@saulyoung)
-- Never, ever, ever ask a girl when is the baby due... it always turns out that she isnt pregnant. (@glassofshutup)
-- Pregnancy Awareness Month? It would have been even better if they'd named it Surprise Pregnancy Awareness Month. More oomph. (@TheParkBench)

Anyone else care to chime in?

Just to spoil the fun, I will say that further investigation revealed that Pregnancy Awareness Month (or PAM, if you will), is a worthy cause, promoting healthy and eco-friendly pregnancies through education, exercise, nutrition and wellness and nurturing. (It's sponsored by Seventh Generation.) Still, I think they could have come up with a slightly better name.

*As far as the 'never ask a gal when the baby is due' response, you can read about my own experience with that here. Also, I claim that there's never a time that I'm not craving ice cream, so that's a bad pregnancy litmus test.

Put that pizza box to work

Someone tell me why this hasn't been thought of before:

Have you hugged an Earth today?

You may have heard, but tomorrow is Earth Day. Now, I'm a firm believer in the 'every day is Earth Day' approach, but I do give credit to Earth Day raising awareness of the need for us all to be more environmentally aware long before it was the trendy thing to do.

First, some fun stuff.

Grist.org, which is also of the 'every day is Earth Day' minset, will give you a free download of their book 'Wake Up and Smell the Planet' if you register at the website. You'll also be entered into a drawing for a free trip to Bonnaroo in June (in the greatest state in the union, ahem.)

The Price is Right is doing a green-themed show with Ed Begley Jr. Contestants will bid on eco-friendly products for chances to win things like an electric bike and ... A NEW CAR! that's a Prius. (Imagine Rod Roddy reading that last little bit for you).

Now. I asked Modern Jay, our resident green guru what should we all be aware of this Earth Day. He says:

"For those who are policy-minded, the House is spending a ton of time this week looking at the ups and downs of new climate legislation -- Al Gore is schedule to talk on Friday. It's a little wonky, but it's a debate worth paying attnetion to, as it's likely going to affect a whole lot of stuff for the next decade or longer."

For more background on what's going on at Capitol Hill, check out this article from Politico. The Pew Center for Global Climate Change has a rundown on some of the bills being considered.

Want to get more involved? Check out the Repower America campaign.

Make Yellow go green

Once a year at work at my old position in Nashville, without fail, we would receive a bundle of phone books -- one for pretty much every phone we had in the office, which outnumbered people like five to one. And those phone books stayed bundled in their plastic wrap pretty much until the next bundle arrived a year later and someone finally decided they should be tossed.

Cause really, who uses hard copy phone books anymore? That's what Google is for.

I think our office manager called the phone company to try to tell them we didn't need any more phone books, but I'm pretty sure that didn't stop them from coming.

Well, a project called Yellow Pages Goes Green makes it very, very simple to opt out. Click here for the form to opt your address out of receiving books ... you can select yellow pages, white pages or both.

And if you need some more motivation than just not wanting those wieldy books around your house, consider this from Yellow Pages Goes Green:

To produce the 500 million books distributed annually:

• 19 million trees need to be harvested
• 1.6 billion pounds of paper are wasted
• 7.2 million barrels of oil are misspent in their processing (not including the wasted gas used for their delivery to your doorstep)
• 268,000 cubic yards of landfill are taken up
• 3.2 billion kilowatt hours of electricity are squandered

(Cheers to Cool People Care)

UPDATE: Ken, who appears to be commenting on behalf of the phone book industry, wants to clarify the source of the paper for the phone books:

"Currently, on average, most publishers are using about 40% recycled material (from the newspapers and magazines you are recycling curbside), and the other 60% comes from wood chips and waste products of the lumber industry. If you take a round tree and make square or rectangular lumber from it, you get plenty of chips and other waste. Those by-products make up the other 60% of the raw material needed. Note that these waste products created in lumber milling would normally end up in landfills."

That's certainly good to know, but I shall add my own additional 2 cents in saying that it still takes resources to package and ship these books, which judging by the other comments, some people don't want in the first place. I imagine the recycled material could be repurposed into another paper product.

Merry CO2-free Christmas!

Modern Jay just sent me a cool Christmas gift: a certificate for 136 pounds of carbon offsets (countering about a day's worth of CO2) donated in my name by Brighter Planet as part of its One Day campaign. I can't quite figure out where the money to pay for the offsets comes from by looking at the website, but even if it's not legit the promotion of the message about carbon offsets is a good thing, right?

Want to cash in on the free day's worth of carbon offset action? Click here and sign up!

Merry CO2-free Christmas!

Fuelly revisited

About three months ago, I mentioned I'd signed up for the gas-consumption tracking site Fuelly.com. Since then I've been meticulously tracking every one of Elvis One's fillups to get a sense of just how good (or bad) my gas mileage was.

I've done 10 fillups since the start -- I missed one somewhere along the way when I lost the receipt of my gas purchase. The interstate MPG is about what I supposed, 29.9, and the in-town MPG is about a mile-per-gallon worse than I thought, 26.4.

What I find interesting is what has an effect on my car's mileage and what doesn't. Oddly enough, having a bad tire didn't seem to faze the car too much, and since I got all four tires replaced, I've actually gotten slightly worse mileage. The tank with the worst mileage came when I turned the heater on for the first time this season, and unsurprisingly my best mileage came on an interstate drive from Asheville to Knoxville (ie, a roll down the mountains rather than up).

(I'm also paying $2 fewer per gallon since I started keeping track. Ridiculous.)

Anyway, I'm re-recommending the site to you now because of all the value I've found in it. Even if you already keep track of your mileage without the help of a website, you can compare how well your car is doing to how well other cars of the same make/model/year are doing. (Just don't compare your non-hybrid car to the Prius; it will make you cry.)

Or, if you're researching cars to purchase, you can get a good idea of what you're getting into since EPA fuel economy estimates done before this year hardly mean squat.

Friday vignettes

Two random things from my Friday that I felt the urge to write about ...

They're making vending machines these days with fancy technology that senses when the machine hasn't properly dispensed your order. We have them at work. They have a little laser-beam like sensor at the bottom, and if your selection hasn't dropped after the first try, the machine tries to dispense it again.

Today when I was hankering for a munchie, the machine seemed to have a problem. First try yielded nothing. Nor did the second. The bags of Fritos were getting caught at their corners.

The third try? Three bags of Fritos came dropping to the bottom. For only 75 cents. (And no, Fritos aren't exactly Weight Watchers friendly. More on my current WW state of mind in a day or two).

____________________________________________________

After work I decided to take myself on a date to The Gap. I received a coupon in the mail the other day for a free canvas shopping bag from The Gap, so I wasn't going to miss the opportunity to get mine. While I was there, I decided to buy another thermal T-shirt because I pretty much live in them all winter.

As the clerk was ringing me up, I watched her as she folded both the shirt and the canvas bag as if she was going to put them both in a plastic shopping bag. "Um, you can just put the shirt in the canvas bag," I told her. She looked at me like I was speaking another language. Like she couldn't comprehend not putting a purchase from the store in a plastic bag.

The clerk standing next to her said: "You know, you're the first customer today to request that."

I'm dreaming of a green Thanksgiving

I broke the seal on talk about the holidays, so I'm probably going to be talking about Thanksgiving for the next two weeks straight and Christmas for the next two months. Sorry, I just can't help myself. I love the holidays.

Like I said before, I'm planning out my family's Thanksgiving this year, so I've been scouring blogs and magazines for as many tips as I can find, and I plan on sharing them ALL with you.

Here's a great collection of things you can do to make your Thanksgiving celebration (and really any celebration) a bit greener:

• The Cool Foods Campaign has some tips on how to be both eco-friendly and save money when planning your Thanksgiving meal. Check their links list for more green Thanksgiving ideas.
• TreeHugger has an entire holiday guide with links galore. TreeHugger has also issued the 100-mile challenge: use only local food found within a 100-mile radius of your home.
• The Bon Apetite Managment Company has a handy eco-calculator to help you calculate the carbon footprint of any meal. It's really fun to play with, until you realize how much of an impact your meal is making.

(Cheers to Lime)

It's the holiday travel season

We're only two weeks away from the bona fide beginning to THE holiday season.

Here are some very basic tips for being an organized traveler. Probably stuff you've heard plenty of times, but always good to review.

And here are some tips on how to be green when you travel.

Are you going to be doing any traveling in the next two months? I'll be taking a business trip next week, hosting my parents for Thanksgiving and making the trip to Memphis for a week at Christmas.

More about Lisha Lynn

After testing out Lisha Lynn mineral cosmetics, I wanted to know a little bit more about owner Alicia Redden and how she got involved in the cosmetics business. As it turns out, she's quite the modern gal, and I wanted to share with you a Q&A I did with her, which you'll find below.

Also, if you'd like some more specific information about the contents of Lisha Lynn mineral makeup, check out this post on Allie's Answers.

And I may just have a Lisha Lynn giveaway in the coming weeks, so stay tuned for that.

The Modern Gal: How did you get involved in selling mineral makeup?
Alicia Redden: I began my mineral makeup journey 5 years ago after moving to a much more humid climate. I hated the feeling of gunky liquid foundation halfway through the day and after using minerals for a week, I was hooked! I was disappointed with the customer service of the online company I was buying from, so I decided to quit buying from them and see if I could make it."How hard can it be?"

MG: Is this your full-time job or something you're doing on the side?
AR: I started this company with a toddler and a baby. Now my children are both in school full-time, so this is my full-time job. That's the beauty of owning the business, I can schedule when I want to work! I spend many hours a week researching new marketing methods or preparing company materials as well as working to stay stocked on packaging, labeling, materials, etc. It takes alot more time to do that than to actually make the make up! I have started from scratch, so there are many things to create and prepare as I expand. There is always something else to do!!

MG: How did you learn how to formulate your own makeup?
AR: I did weeks of research, because at the time it was difficult to find the top secret "recipes" to make the foundation. I finally found general recipes and a place to buy the basics. I bought the ingredients and started mixing at home. The first batch was perfect for my skin tone. I was thrilled! After that I had months of learning color to make different shades of foundation, blush and then eyeshadow. I had no background in color theory or anything of that nature. It was all trial and error. And I'm still learning!

MG: Why should people consider switching to mineral makeup if they haven't already?
AR: Mineral makeup is a much healthier option for your skin. True mineral makeup is preservative free. It's also a much more natural makeup than traditional liquid or cream makeup, that tend to contain chemicals for adhesion, preservation, emulsion and so on. Lisha Lynn mineral foundation also has built in sunscreens! And don't assume you can't wear them because you have dry skin! They actually work well with dry skin, I just recommend a really good moisturizer before application (make sure it has time to absorb into the skin first.) For those with oily skin, I recommend the primer powder before application of foundation to extend the wear of the makeup and keep you fresh-faced much longer!

MG: What should people know about your company?
AR: I want to please the customer every time. If that means sending several samples and mixing your foundation shade for you, then I will do that. I also try to prepare the customer for success with minerals by supplying information on proper application techniques. Many people who aren't happy with minerals are not applying them properly. You have to start with clean, well-moisturized skin every time. I also am looking for consultants to join my team! There is information on the website on how to join. Best of all, there aren't any monthly quotas!

MG: Do you have any special promotions or offers for new customers?
AR: I run monthly specials available in my newsletters. I also have Try-Me sample kits for those new to minerals who need a few shades of foundation, blush or eyeshadow to try. You can sign up for the newsletters on the website: http://www.lishalynn.com/

Thanks, Alicia!

Arts and crafts time

I found these cute envelopes on Etsy through a link on Budget Ecoist. They're cute but it got me to thinking that envelopes made should be especially easy to make from magazine pages or covers.

So, since I had the morning off, I decided to do a little arts and crafts (when I should be going to the grocery store or cleaning the house).

First I deconstructed a standard envelope. Easy enough. If you're concerned about wasting an envelope you can always tape or glue it back together. I used the envelope as a template for my magazine page, torn out of Martha Stewart Living for testing purposes only.


I then folded the flaps and taped them to one another. The result:

A veggielicious envelope.

Since it would be hard to read any addresses on that, I just taped some leftover white bits of the magazine page where I wanted to label:
I'm not sure I'd take my chances putting this in the mail, but it doesn't seem any flimsier than the envelope I used as my template. You could always use the magzine cover to make things sturdier. I may send this as a test drive to the Modern Mom to see if the Postal Service complains.

Here's another template from this site if you don't have an envelope.

The whole thing took me about 30 seconds. Enjoy!