New Year's Resolution - stop whining and start acting

I'm pretty sure that, with my hamburger-part-2 post, I hit rock bottom.

I was pretty depressed about price versus cost.
Probably, this depression came from the fact i was eating crap (read: free crap).
I feel SO MUCH BETTER when i eat fruit for breakfast and spinach salads for dinner!

Anyway, just about the time I hit "publish" on that post, I started reading Going Green: "A Step-A-Day Program for Lazy Suburbanites". It's a blog by a mom who is making one change a day toward going green.

WOW. She is so positive, ambitious, creative, and driven! One change a day! Reading through all of her past posts, I have decided to get busy doin' instead of being busy whining.

Thanks to an awesome Christmas present from my brother, a "Living Green" page-a-day calendar, I think I'll have an easier time of keeping perspective on all of this.

After all, I already do some pretty green stuff without really thinking about it... so perk up, D!

- I don't use paper towels anymore (still using toilet paper, though... there are some people who are much braver than I am!)
- I don't run the water hardly at all when i brush my teeth
- The heat hasn't been on all winter, and I've used the fireplace like 3 times.
- I'm not showering and/or washing my hair as much. I find that, when I'm doing *nothing* but sitting all day (i.e. not going out for dinner with friends or going to a meeting during lunch), I don't need to shower every day. My day job really is conducive to not showering as often, so if all I'm doing in a day is going to work and back, i can shower every other day. Washing my hair every other day has become so much of a habit that I forgot to wash my hair the other morning on an "on" day! It didn't make too much of a difference, really, so i might need to re-evaluate the every-other-day thing.

Stuff I still consciously think about:

- Recycling. Some days, I just want to throw stuff "away". Since I'm in the middle of a giant house purge (moving soon, maybe?), I'm getting rid of a lot of stuff, and it's very tempting to just throw it in the trash. The sheer volume is overwhelming. I have been able to set some stuff aside for eBay, and recycle some parts of things (cereal boxes, for example) - other stuff (damn those envelopes with plastic windows!) seems like it takes too much mental energy to figure out if it can be recycled.
- Turning off lights. I have to consciously make myself turn off lights, because I'm so lazy I'd really rather not - so it's still not a habit. But I'm getting there!
- The dogs' mess. The topic of Georgia being on reusable puppy pads deserves a post of its own - but suffice to say that, though I've got it set up so that cleaning up after the dogs is relatively green, there are still parts of it that are hard. When we travel, Georgia uses reusable pads and I use paper towels to clean up messes. When I give them baths, I use too much water. The Green Pets Initiative is still a work in progress! More on that later.
- Treating my car gently. It really requires presence of mind to maximize my use of the Prius. Easing up on acceleration, turning it off when i run inside somewhere, driving at 60 on the highway instead of 75, using the windows instead of the a/c - all of this really takes concentration for me.
- Buying stuff. Christmas had me thinking about how much stuff I and my family buy. It's really quite staggering. Even with my recent reductions, we're still going through SO MUCH STUFF - which creates trash, of course. I did some reading over the past week about "green" Christmas presents - buying handmade, giving sustainable gifts (events or services rather than things), and one of the items I stumbled on (I can't find it now) was about how one woman asked for things like having a family member take one less shower a week - this was a gift to her because it not only helped her in her pursuit of being greener, but it also meant that if she wanted to take a longer shower every once in a while, she could rest easy knowing that someone else was using less water so she could enjoy that luxury.

So, moving forward into 2008, I'm very optimistic. I don't expect to ever fully change my stripes (my packrat tendencies are primal, somehow), but developing new habits is good practice for life as well as "living green". The page-a-day calendar will help me stay focused on my desire to develop good habits, which is what I hope 2008 will be about.