Celebrate Earth Day

It's Earth Day.

On the 40th Anniversary of Earth Day, my goal this year is to be a more responsible member of the planet. 

Here's a list of some simple  things that I did that you can do too:

• Paint: I didn't realize how much painting we have done in this house. When our city was having their annual "dump your paint" day, DH pulled all the nearly empty cans of old paint from the garage, we were surprised about the amount we had laying around. The nice thing about the recycle paint program is that the company that receives this donated paint, in turn recycles it into new paint that they offer for free to the residents of our City.  They have a Cafe Latte color that I have been eyeballing....

• Electronics:  I think Best Buy is running an ad right now to drop off old laptops instead of discarding them in the garbage.
• Old Cellphones:  When we clean out one of the old night tables in our bedroom, I found old cellphone batteries (one was from the old Motorola Brick!).  We took these to our local mobile company who has a battery recycle program
• Printer Ink Cartridges:  Most office supplies stores will give you $$$ off for returning empty print cartridges. 
• Eyeglasses:  After learning that reading glasses were not cutting it anymore and I started wearing progressives (nice word for bi-focals?), I realized I still had a collection of old glasses.  There are many charitable organization that would love to receive your old glasses.  I wrote about it here.

Death of a Chicken & Earth Day

So this past week we celebrated another Earth Day, which was followed by numerous stories in the media about going Green. This has had me thinking about some small changes we have and can still make around the house. Such as turning off the lights when you leave a room, turning off the water while brushing my teeth, we changed most of our light bulbs to the energy efficiency type and yesterday we placed an order for windows to replace the old windows to conserve more energy.

As I was looking at various "green" online shops I saw several with "green" pet toys. My dog Emi, now nine, was a terror in her day, no toy could survive the jaws of death, therefore we often purchased toys constructed of rubber or nylon. As she has started aging and the urge to chew has started to diminish this has enable to us finally purchase the softer and cutier toys. Mind you she will still tear them apart, but DH and I smile every-time we bring home another toy. (Yes she is spoiled.) She prances around the house, carrying her new toy high in her mouth and her nose pointed toward the ceiling. It's actually funny to watch. Lately, her favorite toy has been the chicken which I don't remember when we first brought it, or how we discovered it, but it has one of those squeaker things it in and Emi loves it. It will usually last a day or two before (as we say here at home) kills the chicken. So the other week, my husband brought home another chicken, (I think this is her 3rd or 4th chicken)and right on schedule the toes and crown came off.

Her new trick is to slice it's belly open, which should probably scare us...but that's a blog for another time.





So as I was looking at the internal remains of the chicken, it reminded me about the post from Sew Mama Sew and a tutorial featured on their site: Spring Chicken. If I make her a chicken out of fabric then maybe I can reduce the amount of wasted plastic and rubber generated by my little Emi-lou. Obviously I have to make changes to the eyes and beak and use a sturdy fabric, but it might work. Now the trick is to find some type of squeaker to place inside.