Rejoice and Be Glad! Sometimes I stink at that.

Psalm 96:11 

Let the heavens rejoice, let the earth be glad;
   let the sea resound, and all that is in it.

It sure seemed like the heavens were rejoicing today as I stood on a sunny sidewalk, eyes closed and turned up towards the first warm sun I have felt in a very long time. I thanked God for some warmth and bright sunlight, and for the cup of Argo tea I was clutching. (Adorable disposable cups are hard to resist. Must. Buy. Travel mug!)

But overall, geez Louise, have I been a grouch lately! Why is it so hard to just be glad and thankful, especially when I have SO MUCH to be thankful for? It's so easy to criticize, whine, find fault, and nit pick. To take for granted. To stay indoors and feel sorry for myself.

The Bible is full of great imagery about the earth, and loads of poetic descriptions of trees, animals, oceans, and even rocks shouting about how great God is. We humans could take some cues from nature. If you read very far into the Bible, you'll see plenty of tales of people forgetting that God is good and faithful. So on days like today, when I suddenly realize that I'm being a tremendous brat, it's helpful to remember that all of creation is giving thanks and it's time for me to join the party.

I really like the idea of the heavens rejoicing, the earth being glad, and the sea resounding (and everything in it). I picture stars and clouds and beams of bright sunlight singing and giving each other high-5s, the earth whistling while it nudges some spring flower bulbs to start moving.  The sea splashing happily while clown fish and manta rays whirl around under the surf.

Anyway, all this to say that the Grace that surrounds me sometimes takes more work to notice than my gray roots or the recycling bin. But that doesn't mean it is not there every single day. Even days that I am busy being a brat.

Investigating Your Stuff: The Shower

How many products do you use to get ready to leave the house on a typical day? I read somewhere that the average woman uses 14 products every morning. I counted mine today, and if you include the shower, the sink, and the makeup bag, I'm up to a whopping 21 products! Twenty-one. Wow.

And since I'm feeling pretty bedraggled today, and it is snowing, AND I am running out of some products that I use a lot and will soon need to replace, I decided to go on a product muck-raking internet adventure and look up each of my most-used products and see where they stand on the product safety/goodness scale.

The best sources I have found for product investigation are the SkinDeep cosmetic safety database and the Good Guide (both linked under Green Inspiration on this blog). SkinDeep rates products on a 0-10 scale, with 0 indicated zero risk/toxicity and 10 indicating high risk/toxicity. The Good Guide ranks products on their health/safety, environmental impact, and social impact on a scale of 1-10, with 10 being the best.

It's a pretty surprising exercise, and sometimes frustrating, because you can have something that rates low on toxicity (Yay!) but also low on its overall "Goodness" b/c of its environmental impact/social impact. Even more common is something rating pretty high on the Good Guide, but pretty poorly on the SkinDeep ratings. The Good Guide's ratings can end up skewing higher for a product that's a bit more toxic because that same product may use recyclable packaging or be part of a socially responsible product line that still manages to sneak in some carcinogens.

That's why this is a good project for a rainy day. It takes some digging. But I wanted to know, so I did the research. There were some surprising findings! I won't bore with a product by product rehashing, but I'll give you some highlights.

Here's what I've got in my shower:

Stuff I use regularly.

1. Yes to Cucumbers shampoo and conditioner - 2 on SkinDeep (low risk) and 6.9 on the Good Guide (I expected it to be higher on the Good scale, actually).

2. JASON natural bodywash - a disappointing 4 on the SkinDeep (moderately toxic) and only a 6.1 on the Good Guide. I bet you thought that if you bought it at Whole Paycheck, you must be getting something uberhealthy, right? That's what I thought.

3. Color Treated Hair products - The Good Guide gives these anywhere from a 4.8 (pretty un-good) to a 6.8 (pretty good!), but SkinDeep confirmed what I suspected - they all fall into the moderate/high risk group for toxicity.

4. Yummy-smelling "philosophy" products - these were a Christmas gift, but even so, they deserve to be shown the curb. They get between a 5-6 for toxicity. All those sulfates and fragrances and stuff. Sad.

5. Whole Foods 365 Body Lotion - this was the biggest shocker of them all... only a 5.9 on the Good Guide, and "not enough information" on SkinDeep. Again with the Whole Foods healthy fake-out. I'll know better than to assume that if it twice what I would pay for a similar product at Target and claims to be "natural" and/or "organic" that that always means it is actually good stuff.

Luckily, I'm weaning myself off of hair dye, so I can confidently dump the color treatment aids. And by dump of course I mean go out of my way to recycle their containers. I'm switching over to some SUPERDUPER HEALTHY and safe soaps and other bath products just as soon as the other moderately unhealthy products are used up. That will be a separate post, because I'm psyched to try them out.

The big questions I now have are:
1. How should I dispose of the stuff I don't want to keep? Drain? Landfill? Is giving your barely used bottle of expensive High-End scented body soap to a friend essentially saying "Here, I don't want this to give me cancer, but I hear that you don't care about such things, so maybe you would like it." ?

2. When do you use something up to avoid being wasteful, and when do you say "Get behind me, Phalates!" and toss the thing immediately?

Please weigh in with any thoughts or suggestions.

Up next will be Investigating Your Stuff: The Makeup Bag!

Friday Face-off: WD-40 vs. Olive Oil Spray

This may be a weird way to kick of a "Friday Face-Off" concept, but it is definitely the most timely of my planned mashups. When I started scribbling away at blog ideas, I decided that I wanted to have a chance to pit two different products, ideas, actions, or activities against each other and evaluate the results. I promise that the other ideas I have for the Face-Off are cooler things like "Dishwasher vs. Hand wash your dishes" or "Burts Bees vs. Aubrey Organics lip gloss". But today's Face-Off is straight from my actual life this week, so I thought it was kind of fun.

So what about my week inspired me walk around the apartment with a can of olive oil spray, you may ask? Well, after months of suffering, I suddenly decided yesterday that I had HAD IT with our stupid, squeaky front door. While Les didn't seem to notice the offending noises, I had grown weary of wincing with headache and embarrassment every time he or I opened or closed our door.  Ear-splitting screeches would pierce the tranquil apartment hallway as I tried to sneak in or out before any of my neighbors could barge out of their unit and yell at me.

Whenever something was rusty or squeaky or stuck when I was a kid, my dad would bust out a rusty can of WD-40, point it at the offending object, and miraculously all would be well. But as I was about to write myself a post-it note to buy some WD-40 at the Walgreens on my way home from work, I paused to wonder just what is in that yellow and blue can of magic.

Here's what I could find out about the ingredients list: They won't tell us. It's a "trade secret". Ok, fine. That doesn't mean it's made of baby seal tears and ozone, but it does leave a lot to the imagination. Snopes says that the Material Safety Data Sheet for WD-40 lists its ingredients as primarily petroleum-based. Wonderful. We don't want any more of those in our house.

But then I found a couple of sites that claim that the main ingredient in WD-40 is actually compressed fish oil! Well whaddya know. I have a can of compressed oil in my cabinet already:

Actually, I have the generic Target brand olive oil spray. Whatever. I marched happily to the hinges with my can of non-stick spray and gave our door a good lubing. And I can proudly report that the door now swings silently and smoothly. Without an extra can of stuff, trip to the store, or shelling out any more cashola. Is WD-40 really made of fish oil? I don't care. I'd rather not use fish-based products either.

So in our first Friday Face-Off, I'm going to go with Olive Oil Spray for the WIN!

Word Nerd! - What is a "Paraben", and why should I care?

PARABENS

I am a word nerd through and through. I want to know what words mean, where they came from, and how to use them. In undergrad, I took gleeful advantage of our free student membership to the OED Online and could spend hours trolling through the history and subtle nuances of a word's meaning. (Cut me a break, I was a Linguistics major).

But I confess that when it comes to health, science, technology, and general greeny-ness, I often throw words around without having even the slightest clue what they mean. Except maybe a dull sense that something is "bad" or "good". And so, to expand my own working knowledge of the buzz words and phrases relevant to the G3 experiment, I'm going to try to post a Word Nerd feature once a week.

This week, we're gonna start with PARABENS.
My general sense is that Parabens are BAD. But if you had asked me yesterday what they are and why we should chuck them all out of our shower caddies and cabinets, I would have said something like: "...umm... because they are BAD!".  And this confidence in their badness is largely derived from the fact that the expensive greeny shampoos often proudly proclaim that they are PARABEN FREE! So, I guess if they are really proud of that then that means that things without parabens are better, right?

Anyway. I did a little websurfing for us, and I found that while some studies say that parabens are not really that harmful, there are still some pretty sucky potential dangers, including possible links to cancer and messing with your hormones. The simplest explanation for all the fuss was found, of course, on Wikipedia, which explained that parabens can mimic estrogen. And, presumably (this is my editorializing), fake and/or extra estrogen seeping into your delicately balanced body is BAD!

Parabens are used as preservatives in products like shampoos, moisturizers, some pharmaceuticals, and even toothpaste. Some foods also use parabens as preservatives. Wikipedia calmly reminds us that some parabens occur naturally in foods like blueberries.

Seeking some non-wiki information, I turned to the good peeps over at Discovery Health, who have quite a bit of info about parabens and the controversy surrounding their relative danger and/or safety. They are much smarter than I am, so I'll let them speak for themselves.

If you'd like to read a more conspiracy-theorist-style take on the "Is my shampoo really giving me cancer??" debate, check out this article at the Huffington Post. While not specifically about parabens, it's chock full of good old fashioned scare-you-into-using-only-puppy-kisses-as-face-soap gloom and doom. I will probably come back to that article some other time after I've had a chance to read it critically and thoughtfully. Which I couldn't do today, because it is scary.

My Totally Unscientific Conclusion re: Parabens
There are paraben-free options out there that can work for my personal care needs, so why risk it? And parabens-in-food? I imagine that if I stop eating so much prepacked food, I will dramatically reduce my exposure to parabens-as-fungicide in the stuff that I eat. Because really, if it needs an anti-fungal ingredient, do I really want to be eating it?

Going Gray - Phase 1

I've told about 20 people now that I intend to grow out my gray hair this year and see how it looks. Almost every single one of them has said something like; "I've never noticed that you have gray hair!". No offense to my polite dear friends and co-workers, but I must say...Um, duh. You don't notice all the gray hair because I have a substance abuse problem with hair dye. I color my hair at LEAST every six weeks, but more like every month if you count root touch ups and the box dyes that my Hair Guy diplomatically pretends not to notice when I go in for my professional treatment.

When I told Edward, my Hair Guy, about my plans to go gray he warmly issued me a statistic that about 95% of his clients who attempt to grow out their gray give up somewhere in the process, or immediately return to coloring after about one week of gray. He added that he personally does not believe that hair dye poses any health risks, and that he has dozens of clients who have colored their hair religiously for years and have not seen any ill effects. I thanked him for his input, and then told him that I'd like to try anyway, and asked him about my options.

There are 3:

1. Cold Turkey - stop coloring my hair immediately and let the gray grow out.
2. Pixie Cut - cut my hair off down to about two inches or so of roots.
3. Use hi and lo-lights as a visual distraction from my growing roots until I am ready to cut off the dyed ends.

I went with option number three.  Here's a grainy camera phone shot of me with the foils:

The idea is to lighten the areas around the gray streaks.

Foiling is less risky, presumably, because the dye isn't really touching your scalp, just your strands. Plus, it can mix up the light color of the gray against my dark hair. Kind of like creating a diversion.

Eventually, I'm going to have to cut off the offending dark ends if I want to avoid a zebra-striped head. Since my bangs seem to be relatively gray-free, Edward and I are thinking something like this:

But since the darling Michelle Williams has the lithe pixie frame and features to pull off that look with gamine ease, I'm going to have to do some work on slimming down so that I don't end up with a cut that is too tiny for my body. That's OK, though, because I'm on my way to a healthy body too.

Right after I figure out what to do with the 4 boxes of Girl Scout Cookies that appeared on my desk this morning.

No Day But Today

Today's the day! The one year experiment has officially begun. I have pages and pages of notebook full of ideas, topics, questions, and stories to get this thing started. If you have any pressing conundrums for me to research, an eco product for me to test-drive, or any cool websites or blogs for me to add to the link list, please send them my way!

It's only 10am on the first day of the experiment, and I've already flubbed one of the most basic, simplest changes I've committed to make: I'm sipping a latte out of a paper cup with a plastic lid. At least the cup snuggie is made from 100% post-consumer recycled material...

Grabbed on my way home from the polls on this election day morning!

But that's how the best laid plans tend to go for me. And besides, if I had everything all consistent and perfect on the first day of the experiment, I don't think that would make for very exciting blog reading, now would it?

How am I going to celebrate this momentous occasion? The blog launch and my birthday? Well, for one thing, I took the day off so that Les and I could have a date day in the city for my birthday. I have to take the Blog Editor in Chief to the vet for his quarterly blood tests, but then Les and I will reconvene for a veg-tastic late lunch at a  Rick Bayless restaurant I have been wanting to try, and then we'll go to the Chicago Cultural Center to see the Vivian Maier photo exhibit.

Hopefully I can sneak in some yoga this afternoon, and then Les and I are going to go to attempt to gather the necessary ingredients and base pantry items for the next week of our healthy eating challenge AND spend less than $100 doing it. Think we can make it? I'm not so sure, but we're going to give it the old college try. I'll let you know what we come up with. I imagine it will be like a game show. As long as we get to come home and make a from-scratch winter veggie pizza and drink some wine, I will consider it a successful birthday adventure.

Coming up tomorrow (Or later today, depending on how things pan out): Going Gray Phase 1. Or, How to Pretend You Don't Notice That Your Roots are Ridiculous.