A Positively Poetic Priest

Back in Black!  After two weeks of this challenge I have noticed a dramatic change in my laundry habits. While I don't have as much laundry to do, I have had to do small loads on a more regular basis. The number of supporting wool clothing items I have (pants, underwear, shirts, sweaters) is not enough for my previous laundry habit. I love the capsule wardrobe idea, with a couple of specific items to intermix, which is where I hope this challenge will lead, but I will also need to make sure I have enough support items! 

Since my last writing about creation care and environmentally friendly practices, we had a wedding. As always in such cases, the number of people in my household doubled and the amount of stuff quadrupled. There are whole rooms lost to boxes and excess furniture at the moment.  However, with the two of us trying to be eco-friendly, we may be making better strides forward. (The last year of pandemic living helped too.)  We have continued as much as we can (again: pandemic, wedding...). Some of the things have gotten better. Finally being married means my new husband (!) drives less. I can pack his lunch in mostly reusable packing each day.  We are working on other areas of life.  We have dreams of sustainably living in the future in ways that go beyond where we are now: Coffee, razors, cars, capsule wardrobes, kitchen changes, bicycles (though this has less to do with eco-friendly practices and more to do with my husband's obsession with bicycles) being eco-friendly w...

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 ...

Most of the content of our laundry is clothing. Clothing is an important part of our life as a society. Despite our best efforts not to judge people by what they wear, over and over, we judge people by what they wear. In some true ways, we know who people are by what they are wearing. As cues of our interactions, uniforms of all types, restaurant, delivery, mail, priests, and so on, determine how we will talk to and with certain people. Certainly, I find my uniform as a priest always starts interesting conversations when I am out in public. What we wear beyond our work is entirely up to our own sense of comfort, style, and modesty. But how we wear our clothing matters too. The brands we choose make a difference on how our clothing choices impact the world we live in, from the workers who make the clothing to the workers who make the materials and the way the materials are made or grown. The world is an interconnected place and our choices impact a lot of other people. There are pl...

Cloth Napkins After four days of talking about how to do laundry, I am going to move onto the content of my laundry. The content of my laundry has changed over the years. Not only because I wear a lot more professional type clothing than I did in college, but also because I have changed what and how I buy what goes into my laundry. For home uses, cloth napkins are much more environmentally friendly, especially when you've already put into use the last four days of environmentally laundry techniques. Cloth napkins are reusable, they can be washed in cold water with environmentally friendly soap and line dried. Depending on the size of your family, you can buy enough to last a week and do one load of them a week. Granted, paper napkins are more environmentally friendly to create, however, paper napkins are thrown out and build up landfills with single use paper with lots of chemicals in them. Even better, cloth napkins at home can be personalized. Of course, you can buy regula...

 Naturally in my quest for environment-friendly laundry, I had to look into laundry detergent. I will get to soap and other hygiene products, but let's just say, I have spent a good amount of time with this kind of research. With the number of immune and allergy type issues I have, having natural products on my skin and in my clothing is important. Many normal laundry detergents are full of chemicals, which simulate different smells, softness, and so on, but doesn't actually clean or help your clothing. Some of the chemicals actually kill your clothing faster. I'm all for keeping my clothing viable and usable for longer, another way to help the environment! There are lots of natural based laundry detergents out there. If you do some research online, there are plenty of environmentally friendly companies that offer laundry detergent, but you have to order them online and get them shipped. While I am not against ordering online, it can be problematic when things get back-o...

As a cash short college student, at first I tried to get by without dryer sheets. Unfortunately, living in old dorm buildings in Western Pennsylvania, eventually the static got to me. I could almost turn on lights wherever I went with all the static electricity build up! So I gave in and started buying dryer sheets. I tried my best at the time to find other ways to use them after a run or two through the dryer, but then I started learning more about what chemicals are used in dryer sheets and how some of them can be bad for the environment. As much as I loved chemistry classes, the old adage "Better living through chemistry" doesn't always seem to apply. I then started trying to figure out what else to use. The laundry industry does have some alternatives. Most big companies offer a plastic alternative ball for the dryer, many of which are multicolored and spikey. They cut down on static and help the heat move through the load. Thankfully, there are still more eco-fr...

Cold Water When I was a RA in college, one of my number one duties was to teach all the freshman girls on my floor how to do their laundry. Sadly, most of them hadn't learned how to do laundry at home before coming to college, but no one else was going to do their laundry for them. They had to learn the symbols, the techniques, the practicalities of life. I knew how to do laundry, so it wasn't a hard lesson to impart, but being the sort of person I am, at the time I decided to do some more research on laundry techniques so that I could answer all the really hard questions. One of the things I learned at that time was that different loads should probably be done at different water temperatures, but that the most eco-friendly was to wash in cold water. While most people think that temperature affects the soap, that isn't really true, usually temperature affects the material. So while different temperatures of water are suggested for different color loads, all clothing ...

50 Acts of Green 2020 marks the 50th anniversary of Earth Day. I had been planning on doing a dinner church series during the season of Easter with my church, St. John's, around the topic of creation care. With the way things are going with the Coronavirus Pandemic, this dinner church series is not going to happen. However, I still want to celebrate the 50th anniversary of Earth Day with the 50 Days of Easter. I have decided that each day I will take a picture of something in my life that I am doing or have changed in order to be more environmentally friendly and caring towards the Earth. Each day, for the next 50 days, I will celebrate the spring, the Earth, our creation, and the resurrection of new life in Jesus Christ and share this celebration with you. Just to be honest, most of the things I am going to talk about I have started in the last nine months. Some of them I am fairly new to, some of them I have been doing for a while. (I made a list of all the things I am doi...