A Positively Poetic Priest

I'm going to throw one more bathroom change into the mix before moving on to kitchen changes tomorrow. There are a lot of items one uses in the bathroom, soaps, lotions, creams, cotton swabs, cotton balls... some of which I will talk about in other ways or under other titles. However, one thing we all use in the bathroom or over a sink is a toothbrush and toothpaste! In college I started having a very strange problem with my mouth care. I had been using Crest toothpaste pretty much all of my life, but oddly I started having problems with my gums. I had lots of bleeding sores and strips of my gums started coming off. It was gross and I wanted it to stop immediately. My dentist was very surprised and at the time asked me if I had any allergies (and I had no idea at the time...) and suggested I try a natural toothpaste to see if some of the chemicals in the toothpaste were the problem. After searching high and low for what would qualify as a natural toothpaste, I stumbled upon Tom...

Today is a bridge day of sorts. I mean, the bathroom is not the only area of the house I clean. My kitchen actually probably takes the most cleaning time, because I make the most mess there. But my laundry room, and all the other couple of dozen rooms in the Rectory need cleaning too. Now, more than ever, when cleaning is so important to staying healthy, is it important to make good choices for the environment as to which cleaners we use. Many commercial cleaners are full of harsh chemicals which not only can hurt the items we are trying to clean, but also prove problematic for the water system. Chemicals in cleaners can also be harmful to ourselves and our pets, causing irritation, illness, and even organ damage. None of these things are what I want to do when cleaning my house! In the last couple of years I have been on the lookout for good cleaning products which are also eco-friendly. I have found that there are large number of different rating systems and seals of approval, s...

As anyone who has ever met me or seen a picture of me knows, I have a lot of hair. Even french braided, my braid goes on for a while. I don't usually wear it down normally, and I can't even find a picture of me with it down in the last six months... mostly because it gets everywhere when it is down. Anyway, back to hair. Taking care of the hair on one's hair has created lots of passionate arguments about what is the best way or what are the best products or even in what way one should properly comb one's hair. Hair is not always easy to deal with. It doesn't always do what we want it to do, we can't seem to make it stay exactly where we want it to. We lose it far quicker than we want, and it doesn't even stay the same color! There are a lot of shampoo and conditioner options, along with gels, treatments, and other products which say they can make your hair look its best. Unfortunately, pretty much all of them contain chemical that do not really need to be...

Yesterday, I pointed out that the top three consumers of water in a home are the toilets, the clothes washer, and the shower. Other big users are dishwashers/dish washing and sink usage. While we use our sinks for many different things, from hand washing to tooth brushing to rinsing your fruits or veggies, there are ways to moderate your sink usage to cut down on your water waste. Obviously at this point in the 2020 Coronavirus pandemic, I am not going to suggest anyone not follow the CDC guidelines about hand washing. However, do be mindful of how much water your sink is pushing through while you are getting ready to wash or drying your hands afterward! Every little drop counts. Tooth brushing is small beans compared to many other household sink/water usage reasons, only using 3-5 gallons of water if you leave the water running when you brush your teeth. However, even that can be cut down to 1 or less when you turn the water off, leaving 2-4 gallons of water for something else! T...

Don't you just love a nice long hot water shower, especially when you've been not feeling so well. It perks you up immediately, makes you feel more relaxed and able to handle your life. Hot showers really are an amazing convenience of first world technology. I love a nice hot shower in the morning, its part of my regular routine designed to set me up for a good day. However, the top three residential water consumers are toilets, clothes washers, and showers. The average American showers for 8.2 minutes and uses 17.2 gallons of water. Not only do showers consume a huge amount of water, showers use a large amount of energy in heating up the water for showers. Average hot water usage in American households is 45 gallons, which means showering takes up most of the daily total of hot water usage.  Even though water is a renewable resource, as it can be cleaned and reused, most water treatment facilities also consume a good deal of energy (between 20-45 kWh). So the best way to cu...

Warning! Feminine Products! This post openly discusses feminine hygiene products. It wasn't until a few years ago that there are alternatives to tampons and pads. At first, I wasn't comfortable thinking about alternatives, but as I accidentally learned more by listening to other people, I became curious. On their own, tampons and normal pads are by nature single use disposables which create a huge amount of landfill waste (and cost a lot of money!). There are plastics and synthetic materials in tampons and pads which are designed to last a long long time, unlike their final product's intended purpose. A lot of energy and environmental waste comes out of feminine product creation. Creating these products is a relatively new venture on the human timeline, for centuries, women took care of their menstruation in very natural ways, mostly with cloth. Today there are still companies that make reusable cloth pads, along with companies which make menstruation specific underwea...

Certainly at this point during the Pandemic, one cannot fail to bring up toilet paper! Toilet paper is a staple of American life and as the run on toilet paper shows, something lots of people have intense feelings about. I have never been that serious about toilet paper, though I tend to like three-ply better than one or two. I also am a firm believer in recycled toilet paper and tissues. We don't need to be using virgin paper to take care of our waste. Again, as with many things, I don't like extra lotions or chemicals in the products I use, even something as quickly used as a tissue or toilet paper. If you really do your research, you know that toilet paper is not the most environmentally friendly option out there for taking care of cleaning up after toilet waste. A bidet, a toilet-like invention which also squirts water to clean up, uses 37 times less water than it takes to make one roll of toilet paper. If Americans were really interested in being environmentally friendl...

Today is the last day of my week of environmentally friendly laundry changes and a transition into environmentally bathroom changes. The particular item I am talking about today bridges the gap between these two areas of life. Makeup comes in my life under the area of bathroom reform, but my new solution is part of my laundry content as well. Anyone who has known me for a long time knows I came to the makeup game late in life. I didn't start wearing makeup on a regular basis until I was twenty five, and even now in my early thirties, the only regular makeup I wear is mascara. However, when I did start wearing makeup, I recognized that I needed a good way to remove it from my face. Having brown black gunk smeared all over my face and pillow case in the morning was not a pretty sight. I didn't want to ruin all of my washcloths so, at first, like most, I bought the pre-moistened towelettes sold as makeup remover. The towelettes work well, but they are disposable, creating lots ...