A Positively Poetic Priest

It finally got warm enough in north west Pennsylvania. My husband and I put in the first of our two room air conditioners last night. (I also ended up destroying the end of my thumb in the process... but that's another story.) The Rectory we live in does not have central air conditioning and we have found for the most part we don't really need it. The two rooms we desire cooler temperatures in during the summer are the bedroom (to sleep!) and the living room (we have fake velvet couches (which cause static all year long)).  In looking to buy these two room air conditioners, I've learned that air conditioning uses somewhere between 5-10% of all electricity. They also release millions of tons of carbon dioxide into the air. There are some air conditioner makers which claim to be more environmentally friendly, but there are also a number of ways you can cool off your house without using air conditioning. Using ceiling fans properly are great ways of circulating air flow in the...

Sorry Mom, Mother's Day cut flowers are bad for the environment.  Not just Mother's Day, Valentine's Day and Memorial Day and funerals... all of these cut flowers add up to a bad cost on the environment.  Every year the flower industry dumps thousands of tons of harmful chemical pesticides into the environment and travels thousands of miles across long distances using fossil fuels to reach the customer. The trucks must be refrigerated and that means more fuel and more carbon dioxide going into the air. All of this waste goes to making sure the flowers are almost perfect looking.  This really makes me sad, because I love flowers and I like having flowers in my house. Of course, giving up cut flowers doesn't mean I cannot have flowers in the house. Another way to have flowers in the house is to grow them naturally. Buying seeds or plants which have been started naturally and are homegrown bring lots of beauty and color into a room. And you get the satisfaction of having g...

 I haven't done an official trash audit since last April, but I have been noticing lately that the largest volume of trash in my household is currently tissues. Singly-used, paper made, tissues. Last year, I did switch tissue brands so that we were using recycled paper tissues. However, I've still noticed that we use a lot of tissues and that is a lot of water and tree waste to take care of blowing our noses.  So I started thinking about it. What did people use before disposable tissues? Handkerchiefs! Naturally. There was a way to deal with running noses. I have over my life ended up with a few handkerchiefs and haven't really used them. So I did some research. Why did people give up handkerchiefs in favor of disposable tissues? Mostly because people thought they were not sanitary.  After doing some of this research, I also realized its not really that tissues are more hygienic than handkerchiefs, but how we use tissues or handkerchiefs which are the real issue. When we ...