Stress has been ever present for me these past several months and has been building to a point of great frustration and anxiety. My house and my jeans are are bursting at the seems. I have struggled with weight my entire life, so that is nothing new…but this issue with my house has me to the point of nightmares.  I need help! I need help, but the house is so bad I could not let anyone step inside TO help. I would have to clean the house BEFORE the housekeeper came.

Everywhere I turn, there is more stuff. We really bit off more than we could handle when we purchased this 2 bedroom, one bath, 100 year old house. The bathroom is 6×6 with only a claw foot tub. We shower in a make-do stall in the middle of a partially finnished basement. I have only two very, VERY small closets….my daughter’s and the one where I store some Christmas items. I have an eBay room, that is overflowing with all of my teaching supplies (as is a storage area in the building behind the house), and odds and ends of this and that. I have another room that I would like to use as a large walk-in pantry, but it is full to the ceiling with boxes of stuff that we have not unpacked from partially moving in. Guess at this point I should point out that I actually have furniture in two separate houses…because I did not want all of my furniture here in the way while we were remodeling/restoring. For four years, I have lived out of Rubbermaid containers and used make-shift rods for hanging clothes. I don’t have a linen closet…well that is if you count the Rubbermaid container.

I feel as though this clutter/mess perpetuates itself with the stress and my total shut down of being able to function or to figure a way out of it. The mountain of clutter scattered throughout my house is so mind boggling that I absolutely do just shut down….and when I shut down…. nothing gets accomplished AND the clutter/mess gets worse…and so on and so on.  Sometimes I wonder if I am lazy and that is reason/excuse that I cannot seem to get motivated to get organized, but then I realize that my inability to cope is because the overall project is so overwhelming.

In addition to the craziness of my household, I have gained so much weight over these past two years. I am not confident enough to share exactly how much I weigh, but I will share that it is to the point that I am beginning to have medical problems. My family has a history of heart disease and my mother passed away before she turned 60…so turning 50 this past year has added even more to my stress levels.

Debt is another stressful issue at the moment. My two year hiatus is over in a couple of months…the funds have dwindled and unfortunately, we cannot live on one income. Hais’ college expenses are looming on the horizon. In my current mindset and physical condition, I cannot see myself going back to teaching. I either have to get 3/4 of my debt reduced within 6 months or find a way to make decent money working from home…or I will be back to teaching full time. (Just a bit of a disclaimer here…I LOVE teaching…I just do not like everything that goes with it.)

Around the world, people make their New Year’s goals– with weight loss and getting organized usually at or near the top of the list. The older I get, the more that making New Year’s Goals seems futile. I never seem to accomplish those goals, so why bother to set them?So, what am I going to do? Well, I have decided that I am NOT going to just throw my hands up in despair. I am going to take action…small steps toward a total goal of lessening my anxiety in the form of debt, weight and other crap in my life. (please excuse my language for a moment)

I wonder if there are others who struggle with these same issues…in part or whole. If so, I invite you to join me in my own challenge for this year…nope NOT a goal…but a challenge to “Lighten the Load in 2009″. To lighten my debt burden, lighten the weight causing excruciating pain on my back and knees….AND to lighten the weight of the crap (ooops that word again) in my house will be my challenge for these next 11 and one half months. I am challenging myself to Lighten the Load by 11,500 units. A unit is a pound or a dollar….and yes, I have some pretty heavy items in my household. In fact, I am going to knock 1500 off of the list almost immediately, because we just sold our little 1970 VW Beetle.

So here I am confessing my short-comings, fears, and general anxieties about life in hopes that it will motivate me to move forward in a positive, deliberate manner. Would you like to join me?

♥How often do you forget to take your reusable bags to the grocery store? How often to you purchase more than your bags will hold?

I have to admit that on more than one, two, ten…heck…20 occasions, I have forgotten my bags. Either in the car…or still at home. We drive almost 40 miles to do any major grocery shopping, so going back home is rarely an option. I have, however, trekked back to the car to retrieve my multi-colored, eclectic managerie of bags. I also admit, bringing home twice as many plastic bags as I have recycled bags from our major shopping trips.

The other day, I came across this article in the Wall Street Journal…thus the title for this post.

An Inconvenient Bag… the green giveaway of the moment–the reusable shopping bag– is a case study in how tricky it is to make products environmentally friendly. 

It’s manufactured in China, shipped thousands of miles overseas, made with plastic and could take years to decompose. It’s also the hot “green” giveaway of the moment: the reusable shopping bag.

The bags usually are printed with environmental slogans as well as corporate logos and pitched as earth-friendly substitutes for the billions of disposable plastic bags that wind up in landfills every year. Home Depot distributed 500,000 free reusable shopping bags last April on Earth Day, and Wal-Mart gave away one million. One line of bags features tags that read, “Saving the World One Bag at a Time.”

View Slideshow

But well-meaning companies and consumers are finding that shopping bags, like biofuels, are another area where it’s complicated to go green. “If you don’t reuse them, you’re actually worse off by taking one of them,” says Bob Lilienfeld, author of the Use Less Stuff Report, an online newsletter about waste prevention. And because many of the bags are made from heavier material, they’re also likely to sit longer in landfills than their thinner, disposable cousins, according to Ned Thomas, who heads the department of material science and engineering at Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

{snip}

Some, such as the ones sold in Gristedes stores in New York that are printed with the slogan “I used to be a plastic bag,” are misleading. Those bags are also made in China from nonwoven polypropylene and have no recycled content. Stanley Joffe, president of Earthwise Bag Co., the Commerce, Calif., company that designed the bags, says the slogan is meant to point out that the bag itself is reusable, taking the place of a disposable plastic bag.

Some plastic bags are, in fact, made with recycled materials. The polypropylene bags at Staples are made from 30% recycled content, according to company spokesman Mike Black. Target sells six types of bags, including a $5.99 variety made from recycled plastic bags, says spokesman Steve Linders.

And yesterday, at the Clinton Global Initiative, a public-policy gathering in New York of business and political leaders, Wal-Mart pledged to reduce plastic bag waste by about 33% in every store world-wide in the next five years. Starting next month, the company will sell a new blue reusable plastic bag with a small amount of recycled material for 50 cents, half the price of its current black bag, which is 85% recycled plastic, says spokeswoman Shannon Frederick.

Getting people to actually use the bags is another matter. Maximizing their benefits requires changing deeply ingrained behavior, like getting used to taking 30-second showers to lower one’s energy and water use. At present, many of the bags go unused — remaining stashed instead in consumers’ closets or in the trunks of their cars. Earlier this year, KPIX in San Francisco polled 500 of its television viewers and found that more than half — 58% — said they almost never take reusable cloth shopping bags to the grocery store.

Grab That Tote, Use That Bag

Tips for getting into the habit of reusing the reusables:

1. 1. Leave bags by the front door or in the trunk of your car and dangle a reminder from your key chain or the rearview mirror to grab them.
2. 2. Put a reminder on your grocery list and make part of the kids’ allowance hinge on whether they told you to bring the bags that week.
3. 3. When stuck in the checkout line without a reusable bag, choose paper or plastic based on the one you think you’ll reuse the most.

♥This is such a great article, that I hope you will read it in its entirety here.

In the spirit of fun, I thought I would share a photo of a bit of my reusable bag collection. The very last of the article quotes a woman talking about not using certain bags for certain grocery items, such as dripping chicken containers. Do you have a favorite that you treat differently than the others in your collection? I know I do! Do you have one that is more practical than others?

My favorites are my Mount Rushmore and the purple Co-Op bags..which both came from very memorable trips. The Home Depot bag and Sam’s insulated bags are ones that I would recommend to everyone who asks. You cannot tell it by the photo, but that HD bag is HU-U-UGE! It expands and has a sturdy clip and reinforced bars in the top of the bag. I even use it to take my Ebay packages/boxes to the post office.  The insulated bag from Sam’s was a giveaway for signing up for something…I don’t remember…but it is great to get those frozen items home when its 103 degrees outside.

 

 So, show us your favorite bag! Link back to your post in the comments or contact me so that I can post your photo here and include a link to your blog. I think this might be FUN!  ♥ 

Answer: PLENTY!

Lewru, at Wisdom of the Trowel, has a great post Wastrels and the Wastey Wasters They Rode in On….. about how people all around her continually waste resources and seemingly have no clue or care of the negative difference they make on an overburden earth.

She concludes her post with the summation that we all at “different steps in our journey” to becoming a greener society and maybe it is not best to judge (though darn difficult at times), as we all have our own areas in need of greening. She confesses three areas in need of more diligence in her very own quest at reducing waste.

I will let you read her blog to find her three, but I will mention that we have one area in common…solar cooking. My solar oven has yet to arrive (ordered well over a month ago now) and I have not had much success with attempts made with my home-fashioned cookers. My enthusiasm wanes and motivation to “destroy” yet another meal is lacking, so this is the first area I wish to list as needing my attention.

Food storage is an area that I would like to reduce waste. I have not kept on top of monitoring expiration dates, which has resulted in moths and waste.

Making do with what I have is an area that is in serious need in my part of the household.

I want to be better at remembering to take my cloth bags into the grocery. My cup runneth over with plastic bags.

Though small, these four waste reduction areas will see more effort in our household.

I have promised to post the recipe I use for my homemade laundry soap. Making my own laundry soap is not without scrutiny, nor rewards. My family thought Ihad gone bonkers when I began making my laundry soap. DD complained about everything from the scent to the new soap was “bleaching” out the colors of her favorite tee shirts. I happened to like the scent, as it had such a clean aroma to it and the reason her shirts are fading is that she wears the same favorite ones over and over…which means more washing…duh!

DH poked a slight bit of fun at me making my own “hooch”, but after I proved to him the amount of money I was saving, he hasn’t said another word. Correction, when my last batch failed to thicken, he made asked me what I did wrong..haha!

Today, I was going to make another batch and take photos to share, but I found that our water was turned off for the day. Okay, I cannot side step a quick rant here. Our city is undergoing a complete water system revamp..for over a year now. The town is divided into sections and assigned a letter…ours is E. On the post office door, the sections and hours that the water will be turned off are posted…however, I have learned not to depend on the validity of it. I had not check the television or the post office today and found, as I was putting a load of laundry in that there was no water. After a few words left my mouth, I turned the television on to find that the water is to be turned off in my section between 10AM and 4PM with the note An Emergency-Sorry. Holy Cow, has the day gotten away from me? Is after 10:00 already? A quick check showed it to be only 9:15 AM. ! Now my question is why even bother to post something, if it s not going to be correct?  {end rant}

Making your own laundry soap does save a considerable amount of money. I believe my initial investment was less than $20, and yet I have not purchased commercial brand detergent in several months. I still have plenty of my supplies left, and even have FELS NAPTHA Bars for sale at $4.75, which includes shipping.  I figure that I have gone through 40 or so bottles of detergent since I started this method and it boggles my mind, how much I have saved.

Anyhow, here’s my re-SESS-i-peee (recipe) for the laundry soap…it comes with no warrantees, gaurantees, or promises. I now make mine up in a double batch and fill several recycled laundry and vinegar bottles, but I suggest that anyone trying it for the first time to mix only one batch.

HomeMade Laundry Soap

1/3 bar Fels Naptha Bar-Grated

1/2 cup Washing Soda

1/2 cup Borax

~In a large pot, add soap to six cups of water and heat on the stove, set at medium, until soap has melted.

~Add soda and Borax and stir until dissolved.

~ Remove from heat.

~Pour 4 cups hot water into a 5 gallon bucket.

~Add mix to hot water in bucket and stir. ( I use a recycled long piece of wood from a window shade.)

~Add 1 gallon plus 6 cups of water to mixture and stir until mixed.

~Allow laundry soap to sit for 24 hrs. to gel, stirring occasionally.

I use a little over 1/2 cup for regular loads of laundry. You can adjust as needed. Please note that this soap does not really produce bubbles. I have substituted other soaps for the FELS NAPTHA because I could not purchase it locally. Ivory soap, Zote, or homemande scented soaps work also.

If you decide to try this, let me know how your project goes.

My first attempt at solar cooking was not a total success, but subsequent efforts totally bombed. We constructed our makeshift solar cooker out of a cardboard box, weed barrier (which I would not recommend), glass from a screen door and a thermometer. At one point, I had the inside temperature up to 170 degrees, but when I had to reposition the items inside, I must have rearranged it enough that it did not seal as well. We had preheated the oven to around 120 degrees. After a couple of hours, I used a potholder to remove the items…a jar with broccoli and a pan of rice.

The rice and broccoli were not as done as I would have liked it, but it was all still edible.

The next day I was going to try some lentils and rice, but the wind knocked over my window and it shattered. I had seen a video about cooking in black jars using aluminum pans, but I just could not get the temperature up high enough. Luckily, DH is in favor of solar cooking, so I was able to order the Sport Solar Oven from the Peddler’s Wagon. I am so excited because the solar oven kit comes with two black cooking pots,  a solar reflector, oven thermometer, water pasteurization indicator and recipe book, which I am certain will come in handy.  I had looked at the other solar oven they offered, but was happy to see that the pans were included with this particular solar oven.