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.

Direction

I am posting this so I will feel more need to actually do it than just think about it.

I want to post more and perhaps take a bit of a different direction with some of the posts.

First I have a bunch of reuse projects I have done that I want to post about. I never realized how much I actually did until I was cleaning up my "animal room" the other day and I kept coming across different things I have done and seeing them again made me think, "Hey those things are pretty cool I should share them with more than just my animals." Who in reality probably can't even see across the room clear enough to really see them.

That thought right there brings me to the other direction I will go with some posts. Basically it will be me blabbing away, and possibly quite often not making sense, about the odd things I contemplate. I often have these thoughts over dinner, apparently the only time my mind lets go of everything else and I think about the most random things. Well then and sometimes when I am trying to fall asleep. When they happen while I'm in bed I don't say them out loud so my mind tends to let go of them, eventually, and I don't remember them as clearly . When I do think of them at dinner, I share these odd thoughts, realizations, and/or questions that are often quite scientific with my husband and when I finally finish my rambling my food is cold and he shakes his head at me and usually says one of these things, "You are such a nerd", or "You think too much", and sometimes when they make absolutely no sense and just turn into complete gibberish as I try and put my thoughts into actual words other people can understand he says "It's a good think you are hot!"

So if you read a post that is crazy ramblings, kinda like the paragraph above, and you are totally confused, feel free to not read it or you may hurt your brain trying to understand how my mind works. I get told quite often by friends that I make no sense and usually my family can understand my ramblings, because they HAD to learn to be able to communicate with me, even they sometimes are lost, confused, and pained trying to understand me. I don't quite know what it is that I do that confuses people so much but it is part of me and instead of trying to fix it I just let it be and friends and family just live with it as well.

Ha that makes me sound like such a freak, but alas I am so I am just trying to warn anyone who does read any future postings. You have been warned! Read at your own risk!