This one is super crazy easy. I adapted it from The Family Homestead. Thanks for the inspiration, family homestead!
Here’s the recipe I’ve adapted:
1/3 c grated ivory (or fels naphtha) soap
1/2 c washing soda
1/2 c borax
2 gal water
25 drops of lavender essential oil (or your favorite essential oil)
Grate the bar soap (it’ll be about 1/3 of a bar) and add it to 6 cups hot water. Stir til dissolved, then add the dry stuff and stir. When it’s all dissolved, add the rest of the water, 24 cups. This will bring you up to 2 gallons of water total. Add the oil. Let it sit in a big bucket overnight until it gels. After that, pour it into an old laundry soap bottle and go to town. Use about 1/2 c each load.
I love this stuff. It’s gelly, smells good, and is crazy cheap. I paid no more than ten bucks for the boxes of borax and washing soda and a package of ivory soap, and I’ve made quite a few batches this year. Since I put the soap into “real” laundry bottles, my roommates use it, too. They were afraid to do so when I stored the soap in jars. Now, in conventional containers, they don’t know the difference. Bam.
Richard Heinberg (the video at the link, about 12 min long) pontificates exactly how and why I want to simplify:
We can use and buy less and actually be happier.
We can use oil (or other resources) more sparingly, save money in the process, and be healthier along the way.
Hard work is rewarding, not a punishment (and this from a notably lazy person).
In other posts, I’ve calculated out how much having a car costs me each year. Now imagine how much less a smaller house, more meals at home (and sourced from home), and my own sourced power would all cost me. I could easily cut my life-costs in half, I’m thinking. Green actually is cheap!
(I had this post sitting, wondering if it was too rawr-politico-crazy to post. Then I saw my sweet aunt posting about ending gov’t handouts to oil. Sweet. Let’s press play.)
But then something caught my eye in that original article from GOOD. It reads “Rather then [sic] redirect that money to programs that will actually cut our oil demand, immediately save American families money, and more efficiently ease gas prices…” My emphasis. Because why, indeed, aren’t we aiming to use less oil and gas? The problem isn’t that it’s expensive and we should pay less for it by any means necessary (such as subsidies, or underhanded dealings, or lower quality, or drilling in Alaska, or fracking or whatever else craziness there is out there), the problem is that when the prices go up, most of us have no option for any other transportation. Our cars run on it. Our buses and trains run on it. Our heaters run on it. When it’s expensive, people go hungry, freeze, and sometimes lose their jobs (if they can’t afford to get themselves to work).
We need options, people. We need to be able to say “no, today I’m not driving my single-occupant vehicle. Today I’ll a) carpool. b) take public transportation*. c) take my bike. d) walk. e) work from home. And while we’re at home, maybe it’s under the roof where my solar, wind, or other non-oil fuel source is gaining energy. Or in my energy-efficient house that doesn’t need as much heating (or cooling for that matter). Maybe we should take the GOOD challenge and stop driving so damn much this month.
I did the math recently for myself (you can, too, with this quick calculator). I based mine off of my expense history, which gave me a handy-dandy chart divided up by gas, repairs and maintenance, and of course tags, inspections, and insurance.
Thanks, I'd love to save $3500 bucks a year!
I’m betting that not everyone is like me: I live fairly close to work (I planned it that way when I bought my house). I have an old beater that gets pretty good gas mileage. I have the bare bones insurance plan. And I’m at the tail end of investing in my little beater. I might get it some new tires, but when the big stuff hits, I’m not planning on investing more big money into it. When the time comes, I’ll try to go car-lite and then eventually car-free.
But maybe folks live farther away from their work. Maybe work is along freeways that offer absolutely zero chances for cycling or walking, and no public transportation. These are the kinds of options we need to grow as a community, and they’re options that can only be requested locally.
At worst, there’s carpooling and maybe even working from home. If one person could carpool with two other people three days a week, then work at home one day per week, that person could save 60% of his or her normal commuting costs. That’s without any gas subsidies, no extra sidewalks or re-striping for bikes, no bus fleets, and no public transportation of any sort. And, by the bye, how about we take those oil subsidies and put them into public transportation, bikeways, and sidewalks? New projects like those mean new jobs to boot.
I dunno, I’m just thinking out loud here. I just wish people would open their eyes a little bit and see that making gas cost less at the pump, making cars go further on a gallon of gas, and even finding other fuels for cars isn’t really taking care of the problem. It’s just lessening the symptom of high fuel costs.** If fuel subsidies really don’t bring the costs down, then let’s stop with them. Everyone can still pump as much—or as little—as they want. They can drive as much or as little as they want. But geez-o-pete, let’s get some options for the ones who don’t want to pay or drive as much, mk?
*Ideally, any options we give for non-fossil fueled vehicles will also extend to public transportation. In the short term, though, public transpo is cheaper for a person than operating his or her car.
**Just like making disposable bottles from compostable materials is solving the symptom of too much waste.
Yeah, I coulda put an image of beautiful veggies being kept cool in the fridge, but let's be real. This is more accurate for my lifestyle. Image from http://www.waark.com
Now that I’m getting weekly product bushels, I wonder if I could hack this. Dairy’s not much a part of my life, and most produce is better eaten right away anyway. I’d already been thinking about this desert cooler from Africa (a zeer pot), for my little back-yard structure. No, City of Austin, I’m not building a house back there. It’s a shed… in which I happen to work and sometimes fall asleep, and in which I like to store snacks for myself and also have a sink to wash my hands after gardening, and also with a waterless toilet for… um… use with the pool, so people don’t have to go inside. Yes, that’s the ticket.
Holiday Waste. via greenUPGRADER via onlineschools.org.
I can save 20 miles worth of gas, 2 feet of ribbon, buy 25% less food at the store each time, and emphasize mega-buying less at the holidays. I bet you can, too. Hey, we’ll even save money in the process!
“What’s that??”
“Et’s called eh PINT.”
*amazement*
“Ah’m gettin’ one!”
That’s how I feel about these mice (tutorial at the link above). Oh, and bonus? Also on that page is a link to stockings made from sweaters. What?? Yes. Just yes.
Huzzah for the longest day of the year! I think I’ll head to the southern hemi in six months and have another longest day. Man, I’m sure now that I’m solar powered. Anyway, on to the update.
I stopped blogging about them, but I kept on reducing plastics. In March, I concentrated on my cloth shower curtain. It had been a bit of an experiment: just hanging a cotton shower curtain I’d had for a while, using metal hangers I’d made (which I’d like to re-engineer before I recommend you try them, btw), and spraying tea tree oil and vinegar to keep mildew down between washings. Today it’s hanging on the line getting de-grossified by the sun. I use a combination of vinegar and tea tree oil and spritz it down before I get out of the tub. Ultimately, the best way to keep mildew down is to keep the shower curtain pulled across the space. Don’t let it fold up and make little spaces for grossness to grow.
Image from Story of Stuff.com
In April, I bought my first Camelbak-type backpack for hiking. It’s not non-plastic, but it means I can do one more thing without plastic water bottles for convenience, or without plastic sport bottles. I borrowed a stainless-steel canteen and tried that out. I’m still looking for a final option for hiking, but for now, I felt one “big” plastic item to use for years is way better than lots of little plastics. Do you know we use half a billion bottles of water a week?
In May, I made sure to have a spoon and fork into work from home and when our work cafeteria re-opened, I used their real cutlery even when I took food back to my desk. Every few days I return my borrowed items. 🙂 I have a spoon in my car, too, for random in-car uses (yogurt comes to mind). It’s minor, but stuff like that adds up, and it’s ultimately no skin off my nose.
Now, in June, I’ve purchased more Mason and Ball jars. I still save any jar I have and put my bagged items into it as soon as I can. Someday I’ll figure out how to tare the scale at the store and get all my bulk items in my own jars rather than bags. I finally used up all the zip-style baggies in the house and found that my quart jars were in use everywhere and scattered around. I’m happy to not find them! I like trying to tally them all up and enumerating in my head “one has laundry soap in it, 6 are holding flours and beans in the cabinet, …”
Did you know you can stop getting phone books? You can. I’m already daydreaming of a time when I have no more fits of rage over such a tiny (huge) thing as an unwanted cluster of yellow papers, sitting sadly on my porch. Rage… rising…
Edit: Actually, when I got to the bottom of the AT&T page, whaddya know? No “send” or “submit” button on their form! Yellowbook was awesome. AT&T rots, as usual.
Second edit: Then I tried to call the number on the page for AT&T’s unsubmittable form and got a recording with one option. Since the option didn’t apply to me, I pressed nothing. I was walked through the menu-of-one again and after selecting nothing, I was hung up on. Ok… I called back. This time I took the one option, which promised I would have a returned phone call. I got to a new menu, waited to leave a message, and began speaking after the tone. It immediately beeped again and asked if I’d like to review my message. Whu-how. AT&T… get it together.
I don’t care what the local ag extension office says: pesticides are poisons and leach into groundwater. You poison your yard, you poison yourself.
There’s a better way: Malt-o-Meal.
Yep, that same crud my mom used to make me eat as a kid. Well, now it’s my best friend. I heard about this at Sea World (before I saw how cramped and sad the animals were and stopped going). Of course, I can find nothing to footnote that online. Oh well. Just try it. Word is, these ants are like pigeons: when the food they put into their gross little anty faces starts to expand, they can’t burp it up. Nothing like an alien malt-o-meal jumping out of your exoskeleton. Ew. Grits and some other breakfast cereals may work, too.
And if that doesn’t work, A&M is already releasing the ants’ natural predator, a fly that makes the ants into zombies. I support zombification plans! Except, this one sounds a little cane-toady to me…
This one is super crazy easy. I adapted it from The Family Homestead. Thanks for the inspiration, family homestead!
Geekcrafting and Uberdorking 
