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Week seven had quite a few things going on. For starters, my ear is finally on the mend full time and I am beginning to see the light at the end of the tunnel on bills, paperwork, garbage tallying, pics, and everything else I had fallen behind on. Of course now my kids have off tomorrow and the next day (some schoolwide thing) so I won't get much done there, but otherwise I feel like I'm back on track.
The ABC news piece, which kind of came out of nowhere was pretty cool and I was quite happy with it. As they mentioned, I went with a group of school kids to Puente Hills Landfill, the largest landfill in the country, and we toured the landfill, the recycling center, and a water treatment facility there as well. To say that it was a learning opportunity is a slight understatement. I'll be posting about that as soon as i get the pics problems all sorted out.
On that note, i'm upgrading my software on my computer tonight due to a whole slew of tech problems, so if you don't hear from me for a day or two, you'll know what happened.
7 weeks in and I finally have gotten most of the shopping routine down as far as what to bring when I go (bags, tupperware, etc.) I'm not going to lie to you, it took a lot of re-training, and a bit of prep ahead of time to figure out what we are eating that week, but it's now not much more time consuming than before, possibly because it's more organized. That said, i keep on forgetting to bring egg crates back to the farmers market so we now have 4 sitting on the fridge. I haven't listed them because I'm hoping to return them to them next week as they are clean and can be re-used.
Last night (saturday night) came the thing that i knew would come up. My wife has been working 6 days a week on a deadline and she decided that she wanted to order in takeout from this place we usually get from. It gets here and I'm absolutely amazed at how much plastic is involved. Now having said that, I was fairly happy to see that they were actually quite sturdy so they will be re-purposed for art supplies and hardware stuff. We forgot to ask for no utensils (why they deliver utensils to houses is beyond me) so those are being saved for further use down the line. We also got a bunch of soy sauce packs which we'll save but unfortunately will need to be discarded when done. Anyway, bottom line is we learned what not to ask for when ordering in.
One final thing. I had to buy hand soap for the bathroom and it come sin one of those little pump jobbies. Now the old one (which we keep for projects for the girls) still works fine but I don't seem to be able to find bulk hand soap to use to fill these things up. Anyone know where you can find this stuff?
Dave
7 comments:
My local food co-op sells Kiss My Face hand soap out of a huge vat, in bulk. Do you have something like that near you? If not, I think you can also purchase these vats (or maybe a somewhat smaller size) on their website.
I've bought huge containers of liquid soap at Target or Walmart. Instead you might want to look at barsoap which you could purchase without any packaging. My fiance and I are going to try to make our own bar soap as soon as we find lye. You can check it out on our blog http://badhuman.wordpress.com
N.
#64 Recycling
#48 Whole Foods and Grocery Co-ops
http://stuffwhitepeoplelike.wordpress.com/
HAH, I thought #67 Standing Still At Concerts was funnier, but it's a hilarious website. Yours?
I've always gotten my soap refills at BJ's warehouse club, so if you don't have those, then Sam's or Costco. It takes me years to go through one of those big bottles.
Why do you need to use liquid hand soap? We have switched to bars for everything from soap to shampoo to lotion. Why pay for the water?
In fact, Life Less Plastic has switched to bar soap for dishwashing! Check her out!
Thanks for the ideas everyone, I don't know why i didn't think of warehouse supermarkets. We don't belong to one but a friend does so I'll ask her to pick some up.
Beth, the liquid soap thing stems to the girls. The 3 year old tends to get a bit carried away with bar soap and lather it up until it's nothing but a paste glop on the floor, walls, hands, etc. She's a good kid, but i suspect there may be a future scientist in there. Liquid soap for some reason doesn't have the same interest and we've been able to instill in her the idea of one pump of it.
It occurs to me though that if we had a ceramic pump (like the sink one we use) and bought bulk from a dispenser (if that was available) I wonder whether bar or liquid is more energy intensive? I suspect liquid but have no idea why.
Anyway, I'm fairly sure that in a few more years we'll be back to bars but for the time being we'll be buying bulk and re-using the pumpers.
Great link by the way, thanks.
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