Greeny

The Granholm family is on a relatively meager income at the moment. Cory is about to start his "last" semester at Oregon State University, where he has two more classes before he gets his degree. (He's currently negotiating with his counselor to figure out if he needs to take any more credits before he takes his CPA test.) Because we wanted him to be finished with school soon enough to use his degree before he retires, he quit his job (which he'd been at for 12 years!) last September, and we've been living on his financial aid and my salary. It's worked out pretty well so far, though we're not going out buying houses and cars or much of anything extravagant.

In the past several months, I've been reexamining what I suppose could be termed our Carbon Footprint. Though I'm not so concerned about Leaving No Trace for future earthlings, I've been interested in paying more attention to our volume of recycling versus re-using versus throwing things in the garbage. We bought a handful of Envirosax for our groceries awhile back, which have turned out to be a great purchase. Not only are they keeping plastic bags out of Coffin Butte landfill, but they're cute and Trout likes to sleep on them when they're in a pile on the floor waiting for me to re-roll them into their little compact forms. I've been using more natural soaps, reusable... feminine products (not as gross as it sounds, and it's so much better than disposable stuff!), and yesterday I made my second batch of laundry soap!

What brings these two sort-of-unrelated paragraphs together is that I've found that in many cases living with more consciousness towards the environment can actually end up being cheaper than the chemical-filled convenience products on most store shelves. For instance, the laundry soap ingredients end up costing a penny per load, and the little bit of Tide we have left costs closer to 31 cents per load! Plus it's fast and it's fun and you can experiment with essential oils. When we have kids we'll have even more opportunities to be good to the earth and save some money on essentials - I'm actually looking forward to picking out cloth diapers. :)

I know that "thinking green" is kind of a catch phrase at the moment, and I don't usually subscribe to the trend of the moment, but I think this is a win-win situation for our planet and us, as long as one mostly stays away from the expensive products that tout their eco-consciousness and spends a little extra time on research and making our own products, we'll be happier and healthier AND keep a few more dollars in the bank for a special occasion!