a bit of a katie girl.

i have written in the past on the difficulties of “living green”. as part of the volunteer program i am currently participating in, we are required to make a good faith effort at reducing our consumption, eating vegetarian, recycling, etc.

while living simply certainly has had its positives (i can now cook more things with lentils than you may have never known existed), from time to time our efforts toward sustainability take on a decidedly hilarious bent. case in point: the brick in the toilet.

our house has three toilets. in an effort to reduce water consumption we “let it mellow” in all three. we also use a graywater system (read: bucket in the sink) to manually flush one of them. last weekend when my little brother was visiting, the toilet on the second floor broke….something that was remarkably inconvenient for those of us who live on that particular floor. we called our landlord, who paid us a visit last night and then sent us the following e-mail this morning:

A brick was leaning against the fill valve in the tank which prevented the float from moving up and down. The handle is also broken. It looked as thought the handle was broken when the brick was installed, but I can’t be sure. I recommend not putting objects in the tank in order to save water. I can adjust the fill valve to allow varying amounts of water into the tank. Reducing the amount of water below what the manufacturer suggests can affect the ability to flush properly, however.

now, this may seem a bit ridiculous to you. who puts a brick in a toilet? but as it turns out, this is a time honored, water saving trick. which i learned from a quick google search of “brick in toilet”. take for example www.toiletology.com. in addition to providing helpful advice on the topic of “lazy flushing” (which apparently means that you need to flush the toilet twice to get, ahem, all the “stuff” down)…it says the following about bricks in the toilet:

Unfortunately, there is a water saving idea that has circulated for years, that says if you put a brick in the toilet tank you use less water per flush. It’s a bad idea and shouldn’t be used, because the bricks can disintegrate and crumbs will wash into the bowl channel and clog the holes. If the channel becomes clogged with brick crumbs, you are probably going to have to replace the toilet bowl. You can achieve better results using a plastic milk jug filled with enough marbles or gravel to keep it from floating.

In addition, a brick will not displace enough water to matter. There is always an inch or so of water left in the tank when the flapper closes and the tank begins to refill. Bricks are heavy; you could crack a tank if you accidentally drop the brick inside the tank.

well then. it appears that (in the never ending effort toward green living), one of the women who lived in the house before us plopped a brick in the toilet thinking that it would save water. no dice. instead we ended up with a big ‘ol mess on our hands and two toilets for nine people over the weekend (gross). so as i’ve said before, it isn’t easy being green.

this weekend we learned that some efforts toward sustainability can be hazardous…but (as ever) that doesn’t mean we’re get to stop trying. being a good steward of the earth’s resources might not mean putting a brick in the toilet…but there are a host of every day ways to save the planet. you can check out some of my favorites on treehugger.com which has a host of helpful articles including “how to green your sex life” and “how to green your funeral”. hmm.

happy wednesday, everyone! stay tuned for a new katie girl story later this week.

xoxo.
ellie

i’ll be the first to admit that i sometimes tend to focus on fashion and urban living in this blog. little do you know that inside of me is an outdoors loving, sigg water bottle toting, birkenstock wearing, rei shopping, bona fide crunchy. and although i do love a good pedicure…i’m actually at my happiest when i’m anywhere near lake superior or the boundary waters canoe area. so for all you katie girls out there who defy the socially constructed definition of what it means to be female…this one’s for you.

oh, and in case you are wondering…i am, in fact, tossing a log. this picture was taken last fourth of july in the boundary waters while i was competing in the caber toss competition at wilderness canoe base. as i remember, i came in third for the ladies. not a bad showing for an amateur!

i have a confession.

since moving to washington d.c. i sometimes indulge in long, unadulterated fantasies about my little red ford escape. i catch my mind wandering to those blissful collegiate days, when i had to walk a mere half mile to the parking lot at st. olaf college and put the keys in the ignition for instant transportation to such exotic locales as cub foods, target, or the twin cities of minneapolis and st. paul.

life was good.

my escape (or as my friends and i call it, the escápe) is decked out with a six disk cd changer, sun roof, stow and go seating, and plenty of room for my dog. it got me safely to and from camp, work, school, art museums, band concerts…and before this year, before lvc, i may have never been aware of my cute little car’s dirty little secret. it is a bona fide gas guzzler.

at 28 mpg on the highway and an annual fuel cost of $1700 i am beginning to realize the environmental and economical impact of all the driving i did before moving to washington d.c. this year. in the volunteer program i am currently doing, my transportation stipend is $45 a month. i usually spend around $50 which brings my total transportation costs for the entire year to about $600, or a third of what driving would cost.

did i try to talk my middle-aged, slightly cranky father (whom i love dearly) into a hybrid? of course i did. but two years ago when we chose this car he still felt the technology was too new to invest in. he felt that, like the iphone, hybrid cars would reduce in price and increase in quality over the next several years and that it would be better to wait until we purchased one. while i’m not disagreeing, per se, what i am realizing is that it isn’t easy being green.

i am thinking seriously about moving back to minneapolis next year, a city almost completely devoid of convenient public transportation of any sort. a bad bike accident in my younger days (and by younger i mean 18, which found me in me in the cat scan machine in the emergency room with a slight concussion and some memory loss, has left me leery of two wheeled transportation. i do enjoy walking, but it doesn’t always fit so neatly into my type-a, over scheduled lifestyle. so what is an eco-conscious girl to do?

this is one of the many dilemmas i have faced while exploring sustainability this year. for those of you who don’t know, it is one of the core tenets of lutheran volunteer corps. my house of seven female volunteers is working toward the goal slowly…but we have had some hilarious moments along the way. take the diva cup disaster for example.

i am grossed out by diva cups. there, i said it. i know i am a feminist. i know i’m not supposed to think that the menstruation cycle is dirty. i’m supposed to celebrate it, right? be a womyn, connect with the moon goddess or some sort of new age bull shit. but the honest to goodness truth is that i hate blood. in any form. and after several conversations in our house about how bad for your body, the environment and society in general tampons are…all of my roommates ordered diva cups. except me. my one requirement for this arrangement was that i didn’t have to see them. ever. i didn’t even want to know they existed. my roommates agreed and i spent the first six months of this year living in my bleached cotton, plastic applicator fantasy land where i pretended i wasn’t destroying the environment every month and that alternatives simply didn’t exist. and you know what? it worked.

it worked until, after work one day, i saw one of the alternatives staring back at me from the sink. and i screamed. i started jumping up and down, shaking my hands, and yelling at my roommates to come save me. i hadn’t behaved this way since a wolf spider the size of my hand crawled into my sleeping bag at bible camp last summer. the offending roommate came and removed the item. life returned to normal. but i’ll be darned if it hasn’t been bothering me since. in my mind’s eye there it is, little…convenient…reusable. next to its little purple pouch. do i love the environment this much? i’m still deciding.

the truth of the matter is that being green is complicated. “eco-chic” has begun to permeate our lifestyle. a blog post i read recently from her bad mom asked if eco-moms could be the new soccer moms. she wisely asks:

But what if it undermines the cause? What if the ‘trendiness’ of eco-maternity really does just make it seem as though eco-moms are just another version of soccer-mom: fundamentally absorbed in their own interests and disinclined to think beyond their own communities?

greenlagirl also points out that the sheer trendiness of “organic” and “eco-friendly” products have created an undeniably lucrative new market, with some companies failing to deliver what they promise to conscious consumers. apparently, some of the most beloved brands in the business (kiss my face and seventh generation) are being sued by the organic consumers association for containing carcinogens.

so now what? will we ever be green enough? do even the smallest efforts count? i hope so. it may take me awhile to get my hybrid car or to discern which shampoo is going to be least likely to cause cancer…but until then i’ll have my re-usable bags and in season produce. i’ll continue turning off lights, showering every other day, and not drinking bottled water. i’ll keep using all-natural cleaning products and laundry soap. i’ll ride the 80 bus, the world’s most inconvenient method of public transportation, and i will walk. i will drink fair trade, organic coffee and shop at the co-op. i will calculate my eco-footprint and think about ways to reduce it. i will add complication to my life to preserve the beautiful complication of our planet’s delicate ecosystem.

and who knows? i might even start using a diva cup.

xoxo.

ellie