Soap dish

My liquid hand soap ran out in one of the bathrooms about a week ago and instead of buyinganother bottle of liquid soap in another plastic bottle I decided to actually use one of the many bar soaps I have lying around. I have about half a dozen lying around and have had them for many many years and never used one. The only problem is I don't have a soap dish and whatever end of the soap ended on the edge of the sink would get all soggy.

I own one soap dish that I found lying around, that one has been used for my bar face soap. Earlier in the year I went to bar soap in the shower and my husband uses a shampoo bar, both of those are in little rice bowls, I used them because I had broken one and glued it back together so it couldn't be used for food anymore and I have a pair so when we got the shampoo bar I used the matching one, which I later broke and had to glue back together so now they really match, two broken rice bowls for our soap.

I had seen this Chopstick Soap Dish on UncommonGoods.com and really liked it but I have $0 money to spend, especially after Fridays $300 vet trip for the crazy cats. I went walking around the apartment looking for something to use as a soap dish or to make into a soap dish, I found two pairs of wooden disposable chopsticks and my glue gun. I decided to try and make a chopstick soap dish of my own. Of course it looks nothing like the one on uncommon goods and it definitely isn't as pretty but it was free and functional. I just cut each chopstick in half and then glued them together in a grid pattern. After I made one with the disposable chopsticks I decided to use two pairs of some nicer chopsticks and make another for the other bathroom, I have a lotof chopsticks and these I don't use often because their ends are too pointy to cook with, I like chopsticks with blunter ends.

Here is what I ended up with, lighter one is the disposable and darker is the nicer chopsticks:

More on my hair treatments

Since my last update on my hair on April 10th (read it here) where I was at war with my scalp but loving my hair I have been in love with both amazingly. I think the hot coconut oil treatment I did really helped even everything out and let me basically start fresh. The conditioner/treatment thing we put on our shower seems to help with the soap scum issues I was having with baking soda washes. My routine since then has basically been a once or twice weekly baking soda wash with an apple cider vinegar with rosemary essential oil rinse. (read about my no poo start and recipe I use here) I think the rosemary helped some too with my scalp. Things have been going great and no real issues.

I used up my coconut oil last week and was really not wanting to buy more (for the reasons I discuss in my last post about hair, link is above). I read around and apparently shea butter is pretty good to use on hair too and I have been wanting to get some to use on my skin as well so I decided to go that way. My hair has been really dry recently and the idea of a thicker moisturizer really appealed to me. I bought a glass jar (yay for glass jars I love reusing them for other things) of handcrafted shea butter with lavender and mint essential oils from Alaffia. It is not organic but it is fair trade, the organic option was in a heavy plastic jar so I was leaning towards the glass. Shea butter is a lot thicker than coconut oil and it is a bit harder to work through my hair than oil but it is not difficult, it also seems to moisturize a bit better.

Last week I noticed my head was getting flaky again and yesterday after I showered it was HORRIBLY flaky and it hurt. It felt tight and cracked and sore, not very itchy though. So last night I gave myself another scalp oil treatment, this time I opted for grapeseed oil. After I applied it I tied up my hair and slept on it to let it soak in. I also looked around for some other treatments I could use and made myself a thyme tea to use on my scalp. I used 1 tablespoon of thyme in 1/2 a cup of hot water, it smelt great. I let it cool and covered it and put it in the fridge.

I then thought about making some sort deep conditioner or something for the length of my hair since it has been so dry and the season is changing and it is only going to get worse with the cold dry winter weather. I remembered how much my hair seemed to like the flaxseed wash I tried a couple times (read it about here and here) and decided to make a batch and use it just on the length of my hair since it doesn't do so good with the scalp and I didn't want to end up with a weird greasy patch like before. I made a batch, 1 table spoon of whole flaxseeds in 1 cup of water brought to a boil and then simmered for at least 5 mins. To this I also added a bit of clove and a 1/4 stick of cinnamon. It smelled so good, I strained the mixture into a heat safe container that I had a chamomile tea bag in and another tea bag of lavender. I let them steep for a bit and then took them out, let the mixture cool and covered it and put it in the fridge to be used in the morning.

This flaxseed wash is AMAZING as a once in a while wash for you hair. It makes my hair dry so quickly and it makes my natural waves come out in full force. It also seems to brighten up my hair a bit too, clove is suppose to highlight red so that could be a factor too but I didn't use cloves last time and it looked bright then too. The grapeseed oil and thyme tea rinse also seemed to help my scalp a lot. When I showered in the morning I massaged my scalp thoroughly then continued massaging while I used my normal baking soda wash. Followed that with the thyme tea rinse and more massaging and rinsing. That was followed by using the flaxseed wash on the length of my hair and a thorough rinse. As it was drying I worked in some shea butter to the length and then just left it alone.

The color and texture and look and EVERYTHING of my hair is amazing today.

Just look at it:

It took very little effort, the only effort was making the mixtures, which was not difficult at all.

I am definitely going to add a flaxseed wash back into my routine, maybe once or twice a month, I am also thinking of buying some shikakai and trying that as a wash instead of baking soda. The baking soda works but I would like to try and find something different. I read about shikakai on the no poo livejournal page I always fall back on for loads of information on no pooing. Apparently it is used just like baking soda to make a wash, it is also rather cheap like baking soda is, I found it available on amazon. Hopefully I can keep the love going and have trouble free scalp and hair.

My brain knows things I do not

I grew up a baseball fan, went to games quite regularly, the family even had season tickets for a few years in the 90's. I understand and appreciate the game and can hold my own while viewing and enjoying a game. I don't pay all the much attention to baseball anymore and most of the guys I grew up loving are no longer in the game or *shudders* are coaches, boy does that make me feel old. I stopped paying as much attention to baseball a few years back, the whole steroids and bullshit just got too much for me and I just don't see the game the same anymore, but that's not the point of this post. I should also say that I am in no way a fan of basketball of football, both of them I have never really watched and am the typical girl about them, I know practically nothing about the sports and find them stupid and dumb, again just the typical girl.

There are things you can ask me about and I would go um um um I don't know but when watching a baseball game I understand what is going on. Basically there is information I know but can't willingly recall. One such fact is who wears the light and who wears the dark uniforms. I can't for the life of me tell you till earlier this year.

While watching the hockey playoffs I was getting so confused, I knew where the games were being held and I would keep getting excited for a goal and then realize that it was the wrong team. Watching hockey today I found myself doing the same thing, it happens more in the regular season when I watch hockey just for the joy of the game and don't pay as much attention to it because I mainly only get Kings hockey in my area and I have never been a Kings fan. Although since the Ducks were in the playoffs this year I didn't get to watch much of them because once the Kings were eliminated I was apparently in Ducks market and got a lot of blacked out games, pissed me off so bad, I also am not a Ducks fan AT ALL (is it wrong that when I wrote out I said it in my head like a Canadian because we are talking about (also said in my head like a Canadian)hockey).

Back to the hockey playoffs earlier this year, my husband enlightened me to the fact that I was getting confused because in hockey the dark/light home/away colors are the opposite of what they are in baseball. So apparently I know which team wears which uniform, I just can't actually recall this information, and my brain just automatically thought the same way. So I then mention this to my dad when we were watching a hockey playoff game and he tells me why baseball has the dark/light home/away uniforms. The away teams wear the dark because the traveling teams didn't have the facilities to wash their jerseys on away games, this of course is way back in the day. So to make it easier on the away teams they would wear darker uniforms that showed less dirt. Hey I can now remember that fact because that makes sense. Why hockey is the opposite I don't know. Hockey isn't as dirty of a sport, unless you count blood but that has nothing to do for the most part with home or away.

So that is the story of my brain knowing things I didn't know it knew, wonder what else it is hiding from me.

You haven't seen what?

When I was growing up we didn't watch a lot of movies or even tv either. We didn't have cable tv until I was a senior in high school. MTV really mean nothing to me, I never really knew it showed actual music videos, by the time I had access to it I was more into metal which got next to no play on MTV so I never watched it. That may sound all well and good but I have disgusted a few people with the fact that I haven't seen a lot of movies from the late 80's and the 90's and before and beyond, but mostly from that time. My husband has dealt with this and I have watched a few of the movies but he was having a conversation with his cousin the other day and they started listing all these great movies and asking if I had seen them. Usually I would just hang my head and not answer. I am not oblivious to these movies and I know I would like them and a lot of them I have seen most parts but I have never actually watched them from start to finish. So here is a list of movies I have not seen that they can't believe:

Caddyshack

The Burbs

Three Amigos

The Jerk

Airplane

Space Balls

Spy's Like Us

Police Academy

Karate Kid

Godfather (all of them)

Coming to America

Mostly comedies which I love so it is a crime that I haven't seen them apparently. I completely agree with some of them, I know I would love Caddyshack and I have seen most of it but in bits here and there, same with The Burbs. I have also never seen most horror movies from the 80's and 90's, Nightmare on Elm street, Halloween, and even things like Alien and Terminator. I am quite a fragile girl and scare very easily. I deal with it a lot better now that I am older and I do want to watch some of those movies but just like the comedies I just haven't gotten to them. I love B horror movies, the discovery of the SciFi (now SyFy) channel when I was in college was one I was happy to find. I love those B monster movies new and old and ones with lots of camp even if they aren't trying to be campy. There really is no excuse for the lack of movies I have seen and I plan on remedying that, The Burbs should be waiting for me in my mailbox right now from Netflix.

Slacking and computer crash

So I have obviously been slacking on posting, which is something I always do but wanted to change. I have been dealing with some unusual headaches. I have never been plagued by headaches until a few months ago. Now I get them pretty regularly and it is a pain in the, well head actually. It starts as a sore neck for usually a few days and if I can remember to I can keep it at just an annoying sore neck for a few days with occasionally applying an ice pack to the back of my neck base of my skull area. Sometimes I feel it creep up into the back of my head and those headaches aren't debilitating just annoying. Last month though that did NOTHING and it quickly developed into a real headache, pounding front of head/whole head type of headache. Every day I would wake up with a sore neck and by the time early evening rolled around the head would start aching, days I worked, days I didn't work, days I kept busy, and days I spent curled up on the couch, nothing would change the progression. That lasted about a week and then poof all gone. They started again mid last week. This time with a sore back and then sore back and neck and yesterday came the headache. I feel the neck right now and I can feel it starting in my head.

This headache however could be totally caused by stress because my computer crashed on Friday. Vista just crashed for no reason at all and so I had to re-install it and all my drivers and basically start with a fresh new computer, not physically but I lost everything that was on my computer. It is just a personal computer and when my last laptop crashed we bought a VERY large external hard drive and I pretty regularly back up my files onto it so I didn't lose all that much. I have most of my bookmarks, which in reality I don't use that much, but they are a great reference for when I am looking for gifts since I have a million and one eco-friendly sites bookmarked and they have some REALLY cool stuff. I also have a TON of articles and other sites I never got around to reading.

I did lose some photos, nothing too important or anything that makes me that sad but I did lose pictures that I had been meaning to use in a blog post or two, I don't even remember what some of them were and that is why I take pictures, so I can have something to at least remind me of what I wanted to blog about. Gee you think I am a visual learner.

So here is to hoping I can be headache free and that I can get into a mood to post more on my blog, even if it is just non-sense, it feels good to write ones feelings and thoughts and ideas down in a semi-lucid way and just have it there for you to read. (By you I mean myself, I really could careless if someone reads this but that doesn't mean I don't appreciate those who might actually be reading this, it just isn't really the reason I do it. If other enjoy then great, if they don't that's fine too.)

Aw how sweet

I come home from work and small talk between myself and my husband leads to him telling me about a conversation he had with his friend/coworker who we hang out with more than anyone else, but we are home bodies so we don't actually spend that much time with him. His friend is determined to get him out of the house without me because we always go everywhere together and that is no exaggeration. My husband responds, Why do I need to go out without her? His friend, I don't know you are just always together. Husband, because I like being with her. That's kinda why I married her.

Aw isn't that just the sweetest thing. He finds himself in conversations like that a lot, he is the only married guy so his friends just totally don't get the lifestyle, most of them don't even have girlfriends. I find it funny that they can't even comprehend being in a relationship and how we actually want and like to spend all our time together. It's not like I stop him from going places or an a drag when we do go places, although I have been guilty of that before sometimes a girl just feels crappy and needs to go home. Just a little something I thought I'd share.

Jean Insulation

In my inbox today is Low Impact Livings newsletter. In it they discuss greening your jeans. The one part I'd like to share specifically is about denim insulation. It is suppose to be great stuff, better rated than fiberglass, no nasty chemicals, and reuse perhaps at its best. If I ever have the opportunity to build a house or re-model or things of that nature I will definitely look into denim insulation, but I live in an apartment right now and am living the wonderful life style of pay check to pay check and barely making it by so that is something that is not in the foreseeable future.

I always wondered where they got the denim for denim insulation and figured a lot of it was probably virgin denim, which I am sure it is, I have not done any research or read much on what it is actually made from in that regards. I have a lot of pairs of old jeans that no longer fit or are just busted, mostly because I am still the same size I was in MIDDLE SCHOOL and actually wear some of the same exact clothes I was then.

I was glad to see in this article a link to donate your jeans to be made into denim insulation, I don't think I have ever seen that before, mystery solved on where they do get some of the old jeans for insulation. Oh wait what's that I literally just now visited and read the page and they are NO LONGER TAKING DONATIONS! Ok well guess I can't turn my old jeans into insulation just yet. They will have to sit in a pile in the closet for a few more years maybe. Maybe I should just hang them as faux art on my poorly insulated bedroom walls and maybe they will do a bit of insulating that way.

Oh well I guess I could just go and delete this post since I was all excited about actually finding a place to donate my jeans for use in insulation but still check out the Greening Your Jeans post, it has some other info, although as I did look through that earlier, it says Gap has organic cotton jeans and I haven't been able to actually find them anywhere, maybe they made one pair once and so they get put on the list. Well this post is ending in a bit of a downer, coffee is ready time to drink it out of my nice and shiny mug.

Cleaning stainless steel coffee mug

Dirty coffee stained stainless steel mug

Add a bit of automatic dishwasher powder detergent (I currently have Planet brand so even your green detergents should work) and fill, all the way to the top, with hot water, water straight from the tap will work too but it may need to sit a little longer.

Let sit overnight or for a few hours depending on severity of stains, covered might help a bit too. A little light scrubbing, sometimes just a bit of swishing of water gets it all off, and you have a bright and shiny coffee mug again.

I've also had success cleaning ceramics mugs this way but can't find any other way to easily clean my stainless steel mug.

I get creative sometimes

Thursday I took a dozen old t-shirts that I never wear because they are a bit too big and I grabbed a pair of scissors and made a few halter tops and racerback tanks with the rest. They all look pretty good too if you ask me. They definitely aren't "tailored" but they work for me and my often relaxed style, I say often because every once in a while I do dress up but only so I can wear a pair of killer shoes. I LOVE SHOES!

To turn a t-shirt into a racerback tank check out this video.

To turn a t-shirt into a halter check out this how to guide.

The how to guide on the halter was a bit confusing to me but I figured it out, it helped that I have a halter that is exactly like the one I made. Basically it ties at the neck and lower back. The racerbacks turned out just like the ones in the video for the most part. Here is a pic of one of the halters I made:

Today, well actually tonight I got a bit bored and decided to re-decorate my bedroom. I moved around a lot of the pictures in the apartment the other day, basically re did the pictures hanging in the living room and hadn't put anything back up in the bedroom yet so I got the urge and this is what happened.

I used an old piece of cloth I had as a mock headboard, centered an Erte poster that use to be my granddad's, hung the shell lei's we got on our honeymoon in Maui, and made the bed all pretty, which wasn't so easy because Harley Quinn thinks she is helping but she is really hindering. If only that god awful heater wasn't there. It is useless, if you aren't within six inches of it you feel no heat at all. Worthless piece of crap and so so so ugly.

I can't stand bare walls, the other walls in the bedroom still need to have stuff re-hung, all my Bettie Page art is going up on one wall and then there is still one more wall that I can't figure out what to do with.

Recyling batteries and cfl's

I got this in March, it takes me that long to get things posted, heck my last post was about something I did at Christmas time, hehe.

I come home from work one day and there is a flyer thing hanging on my door knob. As I was walking up the stairs I was thinking great more Domino's or some other pizza joint, or some stupid warning letter from management.

Real quickly must rant on this, I had to have a maintenance guy come and NOT fix my lock the other day, that's a whole different issue. On our personal patio, not shared with anyone else or in view unless you are on it, we have 2 decorative milk carton type boxes that we put our recyclables in and when they are near full we then take those down to the curbside bins when they aren't full. So when he comes to NOT fix my lock he says I need to take the stuff out it can't be on the patio. I say yeah they are full I can't, he looks at me and says yeah take them out. Again I say I CAN'T. He just looks at me like I am speaking a foreign language and says they need to be emptied, again I say I can't empty them the bins are full there is no where to put them. He pauses looking at me for a few minutes doing nothing and I just stare back waiting for the synapses in his brain to finally start working and he finally says oh you mean the dumpster. At that point I just roll my eyes and turn and walk farther into the apartment waiting for him to NOT fix my lock. I'm not sure if he ever really got it but I was so tempted to go and toss the recycles onto the street. I'm just waiting for management to tell me I can't leave the recycles on my patio. They tell me so many things that are so out of left field I can't even mount a defense against it and try and educate them.

Ok back to what I actually had on my door. A flyer for recycling batteries and clf light bulbs. It included a bit of info and had a little pocket on the back side with a sealable bag for you to drop off or send in batteries to be recycled. It had info on recycling bulbs and a web address to where you can properly do that. I was presently surprised. I know management had nothing to do with it because I have seen them put blown tube fluorescent bulbs in the recycle bins. Here are a few pics of the flyer and bag:

This was before the tighter regulations were imposed on batteries being sent in the mail. Read about that HERE. I haven't read anything more on it and not sure what is going on with it. I think it may have stopped my husbands work from recycling batteries because they had a bin at his work and he says they don't have it anymore and I would assume it was because of this regulation, but that is just a complete guess. He works in an area known as business park and there is a company there, E-World Recycler, that is an e-recycler and they have drop off events quite often. Of course I have not participated in any of them, I just have a corner of the apartment stacked with boxes full of old cfl's, batteries, old computer parts, old cd's, old floppy disks, you name it I probably have it in they boxes, teehee, I'm such a hoarder. I really should get off my ass and take the stuff in, it is so close to where we live I can just put all the stuff in my car and if they don't take some of the things I have I can just take it back home and do more research on what to do with it or perhaps they can point me in the right direction.

Quick useless facts about me, I can't spell maintenance correctly for the life of me, I have to correct it with spell checker every time. I also write me instead of my A LOT, I read my post before posting it and I had to change me to my a few times, as I was reading it I was thinking, what am I a pirate! Haha. That is me booty there hands off, argh! I entertain me self so much.

Magazine Christmas Tree

I know it isn't the season for this but while cleaning up my spare closet I came across my magazine Christmas trees. It is beyond simple and if I can do it so can you. I don't remember how I came across the instructions I found but here they are, Magazine Christmas Tree at Just Like Martha.

Only thing I'd like to add is that magazines without a large spine work best for getting an all around Christmas tree, I used an old Interview magazine and two old Reptiles magazine. Here are the two I still have, my mom liked them so much she took one home with her after Christmas at my place.

As for the ball on top you will have to find someone who does origami as good as my mom. I found this ball lying around and un-curled a paper clip and stuck it in the top of the tree and then stuck the ball on top of that.

Confession I took a 26 min shower

Yes I confess I took a 26 minute shower. It is not a daily thing, I washed my hair and shaved and exfoliated my face. I only wash my hair once maybe twice a week depending on how my scalp is feeling. On top of that there are more days I don't shower at all than I do. I don't go by mudnessa just because it's cute. Thankfully I'm not a stinky person and I generally don't look dirty either. I am not an assault on ones senses, well except for maybe taste, I probably don't taste so good if you were to lick me and I guess if you have a 6th sense that probably isn't something you would want to use around me....but that's not for this post.

I have a low flow shower head and it also has a shut off valve that I use when I am lathering or not in need of water on me. It doesn't actually shut off the water it reduces it to a trickle to keep the temperature of the water constant. I love it, makes me feel better about taking the occasional long shower. I also collect my warm up water and use it to water my plants. I wish I could take shorter showers but having hair almost past my butt now it just takes quite a while to even get it wet not to mention rinse it out.

Phone Books and general recycling issues

Oh great look what landed on my doorstop and on the doorstop of all my neighbors!

Not only is it a phone book, it's two phone books in a plastic bag! Ugh there is nothing redeemable about this at all. I have even signed up at YellowPageGoesGreen.org to take myself off the distribution list but of course they still deliver them because they could care less. Especially since I live in an apartment complex, the person that gets paid to deliver them isn't going to try and figure out which apartment may or may not want them. The problem starts way before that though the company isn't going to take the time to make a list in the first place or even bother to listen to an organization that wants to stop unsolicited books. They are just going to keep giving them.

If everyone who doesn't actually want the phone book was to come home and find them and then promptly put them in the recycle bin the bins would be overflowing by days end just with phone books. There are three large bins curbside next to the dumpster and they are always over flowing. We have our own boxes on our patio to put our stuff in because you never know when you are going to be able to actually get stuff in the curbside bins. Most people take their recycles out and if the bins are full they just trash the stuff. The bins are usually pretty much all recyclable stuff but every once in a while you will find bags of trash in the recycle bins. I guess some people are just too lazy to try and figure out what goes where.

It is not so bad here, the first apartment I lived in was horrible. The dumpster and recycle bins were right next to each other and the dumpster was wide open, no lid on it, you could just toss your bag into the open dumpster. For some reason people would still put their trash bags in the COVERED recycle bins. I don't understand that at all, you can just toss your trash in the open dumpster or take the time to open the lid of a dirty recycle bin and put trash in it, how does that make any sense. I am so baffled by the things people do.

Here there isn't that much trash in the recycle bin all that often but the items that people put in the recycle bins are quite often not recyclable. Like a kids plastic toy ride on bike, yes it is plastic but not recyclable plastic, hey at least they are trying. What bugs me the most is what the employees of the complex put in there and do with the recycle bins. When the bins are overflowing and the lids don't close all the way quite often a maintenance guy will go over take out stuff until it does close and put that stuff in the trash. He won't even see if one of the other bins has room or pick out the stuff that isn't actually recyclable first he just takes it all right over to the dumpster. When a kitchen light blows, the long fluorescent tube lights, the maintenance guys put them in the recycle bin. That makes even less sense than the plastic kids bike. I get so angry at what I see in the recycle bins that I have stopped taking our stuff out and make my husband do it and tell him not to tell me what he saw. That doesn't keep me blissfully unaware because the dumpster and recycle bins are right below our apartment so if I look out our bedroom window I can see them and our parking spot is right in front of that area so every time I get into my car and I back out I see the bins spewing with non recyclables.

We have single stream recycling so all items go in the same bins. A few years ago it use to be one bin for plastic and aluminum, one for paper, and one for glass. When they switched to single stream single households got new large blue cans the same size as the large grey trash cans, previously they had three small different colored boxes one for each type. Apartments and condos at the time had three large different colored bins one for each type of recyclable. They didn't replace those with blue bins for apartments and condos until the ones they had needed replacing due to wear and tear. The trash area we use has two blue bins and one red, red was for glass. People don't understand that and still put everything in the blue, including glass, but very few put anything, even glass, in the red so there are basically only two bins being used regularly. I understand the confusion but it really shouldn't be that hard to figure out and why do they pay attention to only glass in that one but continue to fill the others with non recyclables and even straight trash sometimes.