Category Archives: Not Green

If you’re not dead when you enter . . .

We recently attended a visitation at a funeral home in FAR AWAY (in this case, St. Charles).  My smoke alarm sounded immediately upon entering the funeral home.  My first reaction?  Denial: certainly they don’t allow smoking INSIDE this funeral home.

Sadly, I was dead wrong.  This particular establishment, did, indeed include a “lounge” area that allowed smoking.  I guess allowing smoking is a good business model for a funeral home.

Hello, people!  Last time I checked this was the 21st century.  We’ve received repeated warnings about the dangers of tobacco smoke for A LONG TIME.  Even the masterful marketing spin doctors have given up arguing that tobacco is not harmful and have moved on to creating doubt and skepticism about other things, like, oh, global warming/climate change/global weirding (whatever term floats your boat).  Not that I should be too shocked to find this here, as the St. Louis Airport still has indoor smoking lounges.  Ah, life in the Dark Ages.

Like so many other human behaviors and inventions, tobacco is not only bad for human health, it’s also bad for the environment. Chemicals used to grow tobacco poison the land and the tobacco workers; trees are destroyed to make and package cigarettes; butt litter pollutes land and waterways and kills animals.  Click here for more details about the environmental impacts of tobacco production and use.

Worms and a haircut

After the car-bound work week, I strive to make my weekends as car-free as possible.  I made an exception today for worms!  And a haircut.  I found a worm source just outside of St. Louis — Trinity Ranch.  The owner graciously agreed to meet me in Eureka! with the worms.  We met in a Quik Trip parking lot — it may or may not have looked like a drug deal.

Side note: Eureka! When I was a kid and my family visited St. Louis, Six Flags was always the highlight of the trip.  When I moved here, I quickly realized that Six Flags is not in St. Louis at all — it is Far Away.

Still, Eureka! is closer than House Springs, and I combined the worm pick-up with a haircut, located in a different Far Away.

The last time I paid to have someone cut my hair was over two years ago.  Since then, I’ve trimmed it a few times, and my husband cut it twice.  I was apprehensive about having a professional haircut, worried that they would criticize my no-poo routine.  After much fence-sitting, I reluctantly called a stylist who specializes in curly hair (recommended by my curly-haired cousin).

So, how’d it go, you ask?  Well, in just over an hour, she subjected my hair to shampoo, hair gel, and a blow dryer (I can’t remember the last time I used a blow dryer on my hair . . . or gel).  Granted, it was some kind of “better” shampoo, as far as shampoos go, but she shampooed the heck out of my hair.  I’m talking lather, rinse, repeat — three or four times!

To be fair, the cut looks and feels good; she knew her stuff in that regard.  She also didn’t try to push super-frequent shampooing, recommending once every one to two weeks for my hair.  However, I have no plans to jump back on the shampoo/hair product bandwagon again.  I’m rather annoyed that I was not more assertive in declining the whole shampoo procedure in the first place, and I hope this doesn’t disrupt my no-poo routine too much.

After the haircut, I experienced the terror of being LOST in the suburbs.  I quickly rectified the situation by pulling over, turning the car off (no idling!), and grabbing my map.  I arrived home, super hungry, after a longer-than-planned detour into the worlds of Whole Foods (sadly lacking in the food samples I desperately wanted) and Trader Joe’s.

I quickly addressed my own need for food, then turned to my wiggly little friends.  They found their new home ready and waiting (as it had been since my worm-attaining fiasco a few weeks ago).  I planned to post a picture of my hand overflowing with my cute little pets, but someone else has the camera (ahem).  My little wigglers are currently burrowing and settling in to their plush accommodations, but I’ll try to wrangle up a few for a photo shoot later.

Green 3D

About a year ago, we made our biannual trek to the movie theater to see Coraline in 3D.  I enjoyed the movie, but not the thought of thousands of pairs of plastic one-time use 3D glasses headed to the landfill.

After the movie, we held on to our glasses.  Given our infrequent movie viewing, I was highly skeptical about whether it was worth keeping them.  Would we even be able to find them the next time we went to a 3D movie?

Enter Avatar.  I was on the fence about seeing it for a couple of weeks but, after hearing a coworker rave about it, I decided to give it a chance.  Lo and behold, I located our 3D glasses with minimal effort.

We purchased the 3D tickets, paying the additional charge for the glasses we didn’t plan to use.  I suspected the glasses we had were identical to those they were distributing, but, just to be safe, we both accepted a new pair as we entered.  We compared the old and the new, careful to avoid opening the sealed plastic packaging, and found them to be identical, so we returned the unopened packages.  (Real-D, the company that makes the glasses, had changed the packaging a bit (intentionally??), but the contents were equivalent.)

After the movie, I faced the dilemma of recycling my 3D glasses (which had not been available when we saw Coraline), or keeping them for my next 3D movie adventure.

Assuming that they were truly recycling the glasses (i.e., using energy to destroy and melt them to become some other plastic product) and not reusing them (i.e., handing out the still perfectly good glasses to future movie viewers), I opted to save my glasses for future personal use.

In my dream world, the movie theaters would get on board with this and offer a cheaper ticket to those who bring in their own 3D glasses, but I’m sure somebody’s making a killing (and killing the earth) off of that $2-3 dollars per pair.  So next time, I may just have to take matters into my own hands.

Bully pulpit

Sunday found me back at the church in which I grew up, now my parents’ church.  The priest concluded a nice homily with an unrelated, but also nice, message about support to Haiti.

And then, in a sudden turn of events, he started in on health care reform, and the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops’ position on the current versions of health care bills in the House and Senate.  You probably know where this is going.  Oh yes.  Abortion.

I’m not even going there.  But dragging politics into church like that?  Totally inappropriate.  Do you comment on every bill that’s before the House and Senate?  What about the energy and climate change bills?  Did you think to mention those?  Broad issues that affect ALL LIFE on this planet?

No.  No you didn’t.  Just a single, narrow issue that you can’t seem to get over.  Meanwhile, we have no meaningful national response to climate change and energy reform and continue to argue over small details in a health care “reform” bill that will fail to bring meaningful change.  Excuse me while I vomit in the pew.

Broken system

Saturday dawned freezing (as in 0° F, minus some degrees for windchill), with plenty of snow and slick spots still on our smaller streets (i.e., not so great for biking).  Question of the morning: How will we get to the farmer’s market?

With the bike option off of the table, that left a bus/walk combination . . . or driving.  I really hated the idea of driving the relatively short distance (2 1/4 miles) to the farmer’s market.  In fact, I had a bit of an outburst:

“Just drive there?  That’s the typical response.  We insist on having transportation exactly when we want it, with as little effort or inconvenience as possible.  [Walking and public transit] take too long, are inconvenient, don’t go exactly where we want to travel, and require some effort.  Plenty of excuses and lots of laziness!  So we just end up getting in our car and driving, just like everybody else, and nothing changes!”

Of course, my husband was on the receiving end of my little tirade, for suggesting that it might make more sense, in this case, to go ahead and drive.

My frustration was not really with him, but with the systems and structures that have made, and continue to make, driving the easy choice in almost all communities in the U.S.  That, combined with the fact that, unlike us (want to place bets on how few households have discussions about how they’re getting somewhere?  0.00001%?), so many people are completely unaware that there ARE alternatives to driving everywhere, frustrates me to no end (thank you, Captain Obvious).

In the end, we drove to the farmer’s market, and made the trip worthwhile by combining it with a trip to the local hardware store.  Later in the day, I walked/bussed to the library and grocery store, very much enjoying the car-free trip.