It Came From Outer Space…

Maybe it’s just our local Walmart that’s not on the ball, but I was a bit put off today when I found something out. I know there are a lot of other reasons that people dislike Walmart and will probably tell me that I should not shop at the store, but this is something that I noticed today while I was shopping.

Today, as many of you out there in the world know is Earth Day. I’ve been hearing the “save our planet” Walmart commercials for a few weeks now, and while I was in there today they were selling “organic cotton t-shirts” and lots of other products were prominently placed around the store touting their “eco-friendly” nature. All through the store their televisions were talking about how if we all buy Pur water filters and use re-useable cups we’ll save a bunch of money and save the environment too by not drinking bottled water, how we should switch to energy saver light bulbs and things like that, but yet, when I checked out at the register I was given the choice of plastic bags or plastic bags.

Nowhere in the store did I see tote bags, and the only paper bags they had were the right size to put something like a bottle of wine into. I would have happily paid an extra couple of bucks on my bill to get more tote bags. I have about six that I got at my local grocery store for 99 cents each and I’ve seen them at Target for $1.49, but I keep forgetting to pick them up when I go out. If I don’t use them I have tons of friends I can hand them out to, but Walmart didn’t have any.

All over the place in the store they were talking about saving a ton of gallons of water, and how much energy could be saved by each Walmart customer using even just one energy bulb, but what about the fact that we use a billion plastic bags EVERY day in the United States, and I’m sure a good majority of those come from Walmart given how many people I see shopping there any time I drive by. The company themselves could do something about that, rather than telling us customers how much energy we could save buying their energy saver bulbs. Then maybe they could do some decent benefits for their workers too.

To find out more about Reusable Bags click there.

I found an interesting article today thanks to Lupa.

Here’s part of it:

SEEMS GREEN Recycling your disposable plastic water bottles.
TRUE GREEN Sipping tap water from a safely reusable metal bottle.
In the U.S., we dispose of about 70 million plastic water bottles daily. Fewer than 15% are recycled, and bottled water often isn’t any purer than what you can get from your faucet. Meanwhile, tap water is inexpensive and readily available.

That hits home to me because I’ve started drinking a lot more tap water recently, and what am I drinking it out of? An old Zephyrhills water bottle that I have leftover from when we were drinking bottled water because our well hadn’t been fixed yet.

The rest of the article is here: Better Ways to Go Green. I’m off to mail a couple of tote bags to some friends in St. Pete as I’ve started using fabric totes and they’re sending me two of their home-made tote bags in return for some of my earrings and two of the grocery store tote bags.

Trade is fun! and environmentally friendly!
Earth Day is tomorrow! Celebrate our planet!

It’s hard some times to feel that you can still exercise when you don’t have and can’t afford a treadmill or a stair master; but there are many things you can do.

I do try to walk around our neighborhood but as the Florida weather creeps towards unpleasantly hot it’s hard to be able to do that. So, I’ll do mini stair climber things on our stair case, and step aerobics on the bottom step. I’ll chase the munchkin around the yard.

Just cutting out soda is a big help with losing weight because of all the sugar and junk that’s in there. When I really started studying labels on things I was so surprised as to everything that I’ve been putting in my body. The caffeine reduction has been taking it’s toll on my mood, but I’ve found that lying in the yard for a few minutes really helps me to center and get back in the proper frame of mind to continue the day.

I think if I sit in this chair much longer I’m going to need a posture corrector. So, that being said I’m going to try a slightly different chair and actually do some of the jewelry I’ve been meaning to work on for a few days.

I’m doing fairly well with other things like my internal detox. I’ve successfully cut back to only one can of soda a day. The rest of the time I’m drinking water. Hopefully now that I’m weaning down the caffeine intake and the sugar intake it won’t hit me as hard as other times when I’ve just tried to cut things out completely. Some people can do “cold turkey”. I’m not one of them. It’s good to know your own limitations.

I had a nice time today communing with nature too. It’s great to have a yard, and to live in a fairly quiet neighborhood. I was putting up fence posts and once I was done I spent some time just lying on my back in the grass staring at the sky and feeling the sun streaming through the trees. It’s very cool. I forgot how good it feels and did a bit of grounding at the same time which was an added bonus.

With having had to replace a lot of things in the past couple of months I’m often found browsing around on google after the munchkin has gone to bed looking for the best buy that I can find on our limited budget, and finding out which things are necessities to be replaced and which things we can hold off on or find a way to do without.

I’m doing a lot of repairing of parts rather than replacing of wholes, and in our house we’re also running certain things out and replacing them with natural alternatives. I was gratified to find out that my host has been working on lowering their carbon footprint for many years and pride themselves on being eco-friendly. We have energy saving bulbs throughout our house, and I use a steam mop to clean the floors so that I don’t have to use chemicals on the floor, which is good for both the environment and my son and cat.

I’ll talk more about being eco-friendly in a bit, right now I have to do some more things away from the keyboard for a little while.