Saintless

There’s a rumor going around that I might be getting engaged soon. Since I’m hoping the rumor is true, I was happily surprised to run across this blog titled “Eco Bridal: DIY, Upcycle or Handcraft Your Wedding Dress”.

Not only does Leslie Richard list 9 different custom dress designers that are green, she also links to ecoparti, where you can get biodegradable ecofetti and other wedding/party favors.

I’ve told Dax that I want a white wedding, with all the trimmings. I guess now I need to re-evaluate, because a “green wedding” seems more my style. I still want the white dress, though.

It just doesn’t get any better than this. I just found this event posting on my.BarackObama.com:

Goths For Obama @ The Dark Arts Festival (Voter Registration Drive)

I am vISION, singer and co-founder of Tragic Black. I am a big supporter of Barack Obama and hope to inspire new voters at the Dark Arts Festival. We perform on Sunday, Day 3 of the 2008 Dark Arts Festival and will be doing a massive voter registration drive.

TRAGIC BLACK is a five-piece band from Salt Lake City and is amongst the most active and dedicated modern Deathrock bands who attract fans from all over the music spectrum.
More information @: http://tragicblack.com/

The Dark Arts Festival is an annual showcase of gothic, industrial, and underground music, art, and fashion that takes place in Salt Lake City, Utah. Dark Arts Festival 2008 will be at Area 51 on June 6th, 7th and 8th.
More information and Price for the Festival@: http://darkartsfestival.com/

Janet Hurley, Utah for Obama’s awesome Events Coordinator, is looking for a few more volunteers for next weekend’s Utah Pride event. We’ve got a table for both Saturday and Sunday, and we’re going to be in the Parade on Sunday. Janet Lee, who has an amazing skill with crafting (and made our fabulous Utah for Obama flag!) is making a 12 Foot Obama puppet. Come down and help us with either (or both!) events. Sign up for the parade here or tabling here.

It’s gonna be fun!

Alt: I always figured the word ‘blog’ would sound *less* silly as the years went by.

I wonder if there’s a list out there dedicated just to the new words that have spawned as a result of the culture of the interwebs? Think one day we’ll start actually saying “LOL” when we’re talking about laughing?

If you’re not a fan of Bill in Portland Maine, you’re missing out. Today’s episode of Cheers and Jeers started off with this:

Hurricane season starts in five days. If the Grand Committee of Meterological Poobahs hasn’t come up with their list of names yet, may I suggest the following as a way of commemorating the greatest hits of the Bush administration in this, its final year:

Ashcroft
Brownie
Condi
Dick
Enron
Feith
Gonzales
Hughes
Iraq
Jack Abramoff
KBR
Lieberman
Matalin
Negroponte
Osama
Perle
Quagmire
Rummy
Scooter
Turdblossom
Uranium from Africa
Viceroy Bremer
Wolfowitz
Xenophobe
Yoo
Zell

On second thought, that would really be unfair. To the hurricanes.

This is part of my daily must-read list. Everything you need to know, wrapped up into humorous bits, sprinkled with that which you didn’t need to know but are glad you’re not missing out on. Go on, add him to your RSS reader, too. You wouldn’t want to miss Rum and Coke Friday, now would you?

I’ve been a little burnt out as of late. Then I watched this and remembered what it’s all about, and I’m a little less burnt out than I had been.

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AmUUYo9o9eg]

I still get goosebumps every time I hear this speech.

This post was inspired by the City Weekly Salt Blog. Jerre Wroble bemoans rising gas prices, and the inability to get around it’s side effects, ending with the question “Any suggestions?”

I started to reply, but it wound up being a really long reply, and a little off topic, then became more of a rambling self-evaluation, so I decided that it belonged on my blog as an independent post.

Without further ado, here you are, the answer to life, the universe and everything, as it applies to me.

Dealing with the widespread effect of high gas prices isn’t a simple solution deal. It’s kind of like dieting, it takes a lifestyle change, and in my case the solution is to be as green as possible. It’ll actually save money, over the long haul. It’ll cost more in the short run.

Biking to work may be practical one day a week, and carpooling the other 4. I currently work from home 2 days a week, and carpool in our hybrid SUV (Escape) the other 3. That will be changing, when my assignment at work does, but for now that’s where I’m at. I have a friend who owns a hybrid Prius, and works 4 long days a week, instead of 5. Check Google for carpooling options.

Buying local might save you (and the environment) for some things, and others you’ll need to look harder to find the right solution. I haven’t completely gotten there yet, but I do look around to see what I can buy locally, what small businesses I can patronize instead of warehouse stores. I look for things that were made or grown here in Utah, like produce, so they don’t have to be shipped across the country. We try to do things ourselves instead of buying pre-made items.

Spend some quality time with your offspring and have them walk or ride their bikes with you down to the store for a treat, instead of driving.

If you aren’t a gardener, plant an herb garden to get you started. Find neighbors or friends who can “garden share”, and trade produce with them. This is my big goal this year, along with making this neat composter.

Switch to an old-fashioned people-powered lawn mower, instead of a gas one. It’s probably easier than pushing a gas one, so what’s the point of the more expensive, harder to push and harder to maintain gas powered mower? If you have a huge lawn and a driving lawn mower, you probably water your lawn too much and should research best practices for taking care of your lawn, as well as consider xeriscaping.

If you just “have to” go to Ikea at the other end of the valley, find some friends who were going too, and split the gas money.

If you use an RSS Reader, subscribe to “green” blogs, often disguised as craft blogs. These will help you at least keep the ideas going in your head, and might spark some way you and your family can make a big impact that you hadn’t thought of before.

I’m not as green as I’d like to be. But, I’m working towards it. And it took a long time to get the level of buy-in from my boyfriend and kids that I wanted. They have always been supportive, but their mindset is a lot more like my own on this topic than it was a year or two ago. I’ve picked up ideas that I wanted to be part of this lifestyle change, and adopted them slowly.

I shop at Whole Foods a lot, and try to eat mostly organic food. This motivates me to be healthier overall, and when I’m tempted to eat total junk food, I think about the difference between Taco Hell and the food I usually eat is, and I’m totally turned off by the junk food. Organic meat is usually more expensive, though not always. And I’m cutting back my meat portions, and replacing it with veggies and fruit.

I browse the business directory on Local First occasionally, looking to see what stores I might be able to patronize. Make smart choices about where you do business. (For example, XMission uses 100% green power, plus they’re local – find other businesses who do the same) I’ll be attending the Farmer’s Market just as soon as it opens.

I teach my children what “waste” really means, and help them find ideas for what can be done with materials that might otherwise be thrown away, and how not to wind up with such items in the first place. (You should have heard the grilling my 8 year old gave me last week when we talked about this subject!)

We’ve been using shopping bags of our own for a couple of years. Sometimes we forget to bring them, but we’ve gotten to where we bring them 90% of the time now. And when we don’t, we don’t use bags we don’t need, and we ask for paper when it’s available. Those paper bags are what we use in the kitchen to put recycling in, so they always get recycled, and they get used in a practical manner.

We’ve switched over to CFLs throughout the house (I love the daylight ones!), although I can’t bring myself to give up some of my dimmer switches, so we still have a bit to go. We turn the lights out anytime we’re not using them. This didn’t used to seem like a big deal to me, but it’s a huge change from way-back-when.

We use a thermostat with a timer so that we can adjust temperatures in the house 4 times every day of the week.

Nothing will come easy, but if you take baby steps, and continue to increase your lifestyle change, it can be done. You’ll find that eventually you question yourself frequently about whether using or buying a certain item is waste, or how you can change and use less resources. This will really lead to balance, where the important items (like, for me, good toilet paper) are canceled out by your other choices.

Green choices today will save money over time. Companies will be pressured to go green, local products will be cheaper when they become more common, and because they aren’t shipped. As I said before, green is a lifestyle change, but it’s also a social change. And as more an more people make this change, good things will happen. It’ll bring jobs, it’ll be less expensive, and it’ll help keep our planet healthy, as well as the people on it.

Start with your thought process, though. Think about each of the choices you make, and consider what the more expensive, and the less green, choices are worth to you. Even if you don’t do anything about them, at first, it will lead to better choices.

P.S. The “quit bitching” wasn’t aimed at Jerre, and I realized as I reviewed this before posting that it might be taken that way. “Quit bitching” is my personal motto, it’s why I’m involved in politics, and I find that the idea behind “quit bitching and do something” is something very motivating to me, personally.

Update: Apparently, my boyfriend thought I was pointing fingers at him, so let me clarify. He’s always been supportive of whatever I wanted to do about this, but he’s gone from being ok with me doing it, to being an active participant in being green. And when we shop other places than Whole Foods, such as Smith’s or Dan’s, it’s not “his fault”. I still feel the need to buy some things at other places, and I can’t buy stuff like my brand of clothes detergent at any of the green shops.

Last Saturday, I stopped by KCPW after a training session I taught for the Salt Lake County Democrats. I kept meaning to give a donation for their membership drive, but I just hadn’t gotten around to it. So, I stopped in on my way out. The person I spoke with explained that the donations for the purchase of KCPW won’t be charged to my card until later in the year, so I went ahead and gave what I was going to give that day to the membership drive, and committed to more later this year.

As I’ve been listening to the drive, I realized that I’ve never heard them not reach an hourly goal, and yet only once or twice out of 20 or so that I’ve heard this time have made it. So, when I got a Twitter from Pete Ashdown a couple of days ago, I called in while he was on the air and gave a little more. I’ve given as much as I can this time, but I’m going to be really sad if the donation never gets taken out of my account because KCPW goes away.

I just found out that Pete’s wife, Robin, will be on KCPW at 5 tonight with bCollective. If you haven’t yet, and can, please consider calling in and making a donation to keep local public radio going!

Alt: ‘You will have hot, steamy, sweaty sex … IN BED!’

I’m thinking I may have to go for some Chinese tonight.

Alt: True story: I had to try several times to upload this comic because my ssh key was blacklisted.

This is kind of what work feels like lately.