I wrote the following on a friend's facebook wall:
I have so many goals they are innumerable. I make new goals for every area, spiritual, physical, emotional, mental, environmental, spatial, transportational, financial, relational, entertainmental, educational, vocational, technological, recreational, parental, marital, literarical...
And yes I made some of those words up. Or rather added inappropriate endings to real words. Whatever.
I don't always write all of them down, but they are in there- floating around my head and trying to organize themselves into a little army, trying to take control of my life.
For example, environmental. NBC is spending lots of money trying to make me green- why shouldn't I let them? I live in suburbia. We all have garage door openers and Central AC. And we all put our recycle bins out faithfully every other week. And they are always full. I grew up recycling- sorting cans and bottles and snipping the little pop can things that kill ducks. Ok, I never did that because my mom was anti pop and I didn't even know what they were. But we sure did recycle!
When we moved to Indiana, I asked someone where the recycling bins at our apartment complex were. I was told that if I wanted to recycle I would have to haul the stuff downtown to the salvation army. You should all be gasping in disbelief right now. I was appalled. The thing was- the SA didn't even have a full program. For the 2 years I was there I winced everytime I had to throw out a can or bottle.
And then we moved back here. I was working with some kindergartners at church and one of them said something about recycling. One of the other children said, "my mom doesn't recycle". You would have thought he had just announced that his mother was in jail for murder. The other 4 kindergartners at the table stared at the kid with wide eyes. This was highly unacceptable.
So I recycle. And I reuse things. And I don't buy paper towels. And I haul out my trash in the bags from the grocery store. But my environmental resolutions for this year are two: 1. Potty train Lincoln so we stop contributing diapers to the landfill. 2. Do less laundry. If people complain about my kids wearing the same clothes for days in a row, I will quote them statistics and prove to them that I am being green. And they should be too.
So there you have it.
I gotta go make my sign for my new laundry room. It is gonna say, "When you have a healthy respect for laundry, it proves you have a healthy respect for the world."
3 comments:
I didn't grow up recycling. *Gasp*...I know! We didn't have recycling...and there still isn't recycling where I grew up. We tried it once. We could bring our recycling 30 min. into town and hope that the center was open. I believe at one point they even started charging people to drop off their recycling (I'm not positive...it was a long time ago). Heather A - can you confirm or deny?? Needless to say, we stopped trying to recycle. It pains me to throw recyclables out at my parents house. Part of me wants to bring them back to MN when I can properly recycle them.
Now...Mike and I do recycle, but it is still very new to me. What can be recycled, what can't be recycled...I'm learning.
i cannot tell a lie. my family did not recycle 100% but we did do a little recycling. we had two garbages...burn and non burn. anything made of paper or cardboard or even plastic that could burn and not create an explosion was put in the burn garbage and then "burned" in the wood furnace (a process that was named "firing" or "going to fire" or "forgot to fire").
the non burn was anything hard or solid that was broken or not wanted that needed to be thrown away. this was a small part of the garbage and was taken to the transfer station 1-2 times a month.
the small amount of recycling we did involved: glass jars, aluminum cans, probably something else that i can't remember right now, and last but not least pop cans (1/2 of which were returned to the store to get back a 10 cent deposit in MI and the other 1/2 were crushed and put in a large garbage bag and saved until there was a huge bag and taken to the "can crusher" who paid so many cents a pound for the aluminum).
living in my own quarters i find that i do like recycling however, there are times when i would just like a nice hot wood furnace to be able to burn some paper product based things that i don't want to throw in a recycling bin where someone might get a hold of it and steal my identity or something like that. (sorry for the run on sentence). and that's my story on recycling.
I love your recycling stories! That is why I love to blog and especially love comments! I have learned a lot of interesting things about people through their comments- things that I am pretty sure wouldn't come up in your average conversation :)
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