My toilet bowl cleaner also cleans my bathroom sink and bathtub.  I bought the toilet bowl cleaner,          , a few months ago and mentioned to friends that it states on the label that it can be used for cleaning the rest of the bathroom.  Their comment was 'gross!' I only used it for the toilet until today when I stopped to think,  why was using a chemical, toxin free toilet bowl cleans for all my cleaning needs gross?  Is it because we have been conditioned to believe that if it's designed to clean a toilet it's got to be as nasty as the toilet itself to be effective?  It might be.  All I know is that I love having just one cleaner to do all of the work.  It smells good too

I have an enormous block.  I get up to the checkout counter at Traders or Whole Foods and they ask 'paper or plastic' I should say 'neither, I brought my own".  Of course, that rarely happens because though I have an assortment of bags, cloth, insulated, a net bag from Spain and one of Ireland's green bags.  In Ireland if you don't bring your own bag you have to pay for your paper or plastic bags or buy a green bag (and yes, they are green).  In Ireland I never forgot my green bag but I am not as diligent in the USA.  Today I collected my bags and put them in a pile on the passenger side of the car and this photo helped a bit as well  http://www.planetark.com/campaignspage.cfm/newsid/7/story.htm. 

My house is 20 years old and so are my toilets which means we have been using way too much clean drinking water for way too many years flushing toilets.....three toilets.  My daughter introduced the classic way to flush frugally when she was a girl scout and at camp learned the little rhyme.....if it's yellow let it mellow and if it's brown flush it down. 

That has had some success but enough so I found somesmall river rocks and filled up my tanks with as many of them as I could without interferring with the flushing mechanism. 

Finally I found an awesome product called the Frugal Flush.  It's designed to close before the toilet tank completely empties during a flush and it has made the most difference yet.  


Check out their website  http://www.cetsolar.com/toilettummy.htm!  They have quite a few goodies besides the frugal flusher.  Also check your city water department.  I live in Chandler and they offer, for FREE, yes, FREE a low water use kit that includes aerators for your sink faucets, 2 low water use shower head and a bladder to place in your toilet tank to reduce water use. If your city does not offer water conservation measures it's a good time to show your disappointment and write them a letter about ecological responsibility!  

Today I replaced my river rocks with a bladder and ordered 25 frugal flushers.  I replaced mine and will keep the rest for my remodels and gifts.  Happy flushing!

Today was the first day of my green building class at Scottsdale Community College.  Our instructor showed us a movie Ecological Design: Inventing the Future.  I was a look at our future told from around 1930 into the 80's.  Like An Inconvenient Truth it was eye opening.  http://www.designoutlaws.com/  Here's a website to check out and I if this interestes you like it does me i plan to learn about Buckminster Fuller who was definitely a genius  

I am throwing out my last surviving Teflon pan today because I read that it just takes 2-5 minutes on the stove top for the chemical in it (PFOA) to leach.  Plus the Environmental Working Group has an entire, not so positive, section devoted to Teflon so it was time to listen.  The reason we haven't gotten rid of our pan is because cast iron was too heavy and we don't seem to know how to fry food in a stainless steel pan.  Cooks we are not, I guess.  My dilemma is that I don't want to recycle this product and I don't want to send it to the landfill.  I'll have to think about this one!

I just purchased microfibre cloths for dusting, doing dishes, drying our dogs and washing my floors.   I use them for everything.  They are chemical free, I no longer buy paper towels so it saves the landfill, they reduce the use of chemicals (no more dusting sprays), they last forever and they are amazing cleaning tools.  For my birthday I got a Swiffer Sweeper and since I won't buy the throw away chemical laced pads I just use my microfibre towels and attach them to the Swiffer instead.  When I clean windows I just dampen one of the cloths and the smudges come right off. 

It's my green drink.  I am back to drinking a green drink in the morning before breaksfast and today I will be using lettuce from my container garden.  A few months ago I bought some organic seeds and planted them in a few large flower pots I had laying around and soon I had flower pots full of leaf lettuce.  We have been getting frost in Arizona and though it doesn't seem to affect the lettuce I cut my last 'crop' this morning and used it in my green drink.   Having your own garden is the ultimate in feeding your body because you can put the nutrients in the soil that you want in your lettuce that will eventually find it's way into your body.  

We had to remove the old patio from the home we are remodeling because it was lifting.  Last year the resulting pile would have been garbage but today it's URBANITE!   We carried, hauled and carried again a trailer full of patio chunks to our family home to make a border for our gardens.   The rest we will use as a border for a garden at the remodel. 

Urbanite I thought was a cute name that was the concoction of our Arizona permaculture group but it's actually in the encyclopedia as An alternate definition of Urbanite in the United Statedis a humorous description of recycled concrete, typically from old sidewalks or other flat concrete slabs removed during construction.   Not so sure why it's humorous because it's definitely versatile.  Use it for patios, wall, and borders to name a few examples.