Freshaire paint - totally worth it!

Well, I'm painting my room, and I was SO HAPPY to find that my local Home Depot finally offers a low-VOC choice!!! It was about 35% more than me getting "normal" paint.


Freshaire paints don't have quite the color selection of, say, Behr or Glidden (it's closer to Ralph Lauren's palatte), but I am blissfully happy with my choices of "Reef Pink" and "Arbor Vine"... and my sinuses are even more happy with the fact that there is barely any smell at all. One of my housemates, when I apologized for any smell he might have noticed, said "Oh! That was paint? It smelled a little funny, but i had no idea you had painted the room!"

I think that is pretty much a perfect endorsement of the product. That and my lack of migraine!

I painted two walls green and two pink, then added some funky striping running around the room.

wow. I am SO glad I bought a camelbak

So - I've been grousing lately about how I want a stainless steel water bottle - my latest reminder was from the Think Outside The Bottle people, who were offering some logo-ed bottles for purchase.

But now...

oh, now.

SIGG, the big name-brand face to the stainless steel water bottle craze, which took off after the fuss over BPA in water bottles like Nalgenes (and prompted me to buy a Camelbak), has apparently been coating the inside of their bottles with... ::drumroll:: BPA!

I saw the story on Salon.com today, and I'm disappointed but not surprised.

One of the biggest challenges for Green Me is that I feel kind of powerless about stuff like this. I just finished reading The Ominvore's Dilemma (a post on that to come!), and it made me feel trapped in the same way this SIGG thing has done. Little ole me is just another block in the wall (like this lady).

I've got bigger personal fish to fry these days, so another Corporate Accountability Scandal doesn't faze me much. Sometimes, all you can do is all you can do.

So you should make a point to do the following: add SIGG to the list of products you don't buy.

Guest Post on Just Move Monday for the Zaftig Chicks

Over the past two months I've been doing probably a million, bajillion things, but one of the less-stressful ones has been to read some of the blogs on the fat-o-sphere feed.

That's how i came to know of Bianca & Sylvia, the Zaftig Chicks.

As a way to fight the stress of the past two months, i've been hot-yoga-ing a lot, and when the girls asked if anyone wanted to guest-contribute a blog post, it seemed like a nice opportunity to write about my practice. You can check it out here.

Meanwhile, although I haven't been posting anything here, I HAVE been tweeting, and those tweets relate to green things, including the chickens (now there are 15!). The garden has been producing the first tomatoes of the season, and my belly is READY to give them a home... I'll definitely share more as Dallas' harvests come in.

I've been doing a little "activist" stuff, too. My friend Molly and I went to check out the new TN headquarters of Repower America and then I went with a couple strangers to visit the offices of the two TN senators to tell them that I support the ACES act.

ALSO - I give a hearty thumbs-up to the Murfreesboro toothpaste I got from The Green Wagon, as well as the castile soap shampoo (i can't remember the name of it) that you can buy by the ounce (!). They'll be opening their East Nashville location oh-so-very soon, so you'll have 100% more opportunities to buy green!

Meanwhile, think good thoughts for me as I embark upon a quest for better living through altering my chemical composition with the help of the Pharmaceutical-Industrial Complex :(

25% off sale at The Green Wagon this Saturday!

Find your thrill(er)...

The Green Wagon's shaking off the summer weirdness and playing Michael Jackson tunes all weekend... plus everything's 25% off on Saturday.

I suggest trying the new toothpaste they have in stock - it's made in Murfreesboro!
And an Alchemy of Sol soap bar is NEVER a bad bet.

Cleaning up a broken CFL bulb...

Many thanks to my uncle for sending this link my way...

I knew that you had to recycle your CFL bulbs in a special way, but this is getting ridiculous! What a way to scare people away from using CFLs! I mean, come on folks, you should be more worried about eating tuna than breaking one bulb...

Happy Earth Day!

To celebrate, i give you a picture of my very modest veggies...
they're all coming up! whoohoo!

Top left: spinach
bottom left: romaine
middle: green-leaf lettuce
top right: tomatoes
bottom right: bell peppers

giving gardening another go...

Last year I tried to grow some tomatoes.
Target had some little grow-pots in their dollar-bin and I thought wouldn't it be sweet to have my own tomatoes...

well, sadly, instead of April showers bringing me tomatoes, they just washed away the little sprouts and all the soil. It was pretty sad.

This year, I am determined to NOT let my little sprouts die in a torrential rain storm.

And I DO have sprouts!
They're tiny, but they're there!

This picture was taken a week ago - right now the middle container is chock-full of sprouts and the tomatoes (in the left container) have just begun to sprout.

I am very excited about the prospect of salads every day!