But I will try to get over that because posting SOMETHING is better than NOTHING. I mean, I can convey useful information quickly, if somewhat less wittily and/or profoundly, right?

Here goes…

You might recall that I’ve had a few ups and downs in my quest to say goodbye to commercial toothpaste permanently. But I’m happy to say that I have finally settled on a recipe I like and that the interwebs have convinced me is extremely effective.

Here are the directions for making it. Although you don’t need to look at them really–just mix food grade coconut oil and baking soda together until they make a paste. I added the peppermint oil for flavor. But skipped the sweetener because I have PTSD from my ill-fated first try at it. (Although I did find the pure stevia at Whole Foods–it was in the stupid health supplement section all along. Dur.)

Anyway, it’s working quite nicely! It’s kind of luxurious, even.

(And just as an aside that to me sort of reflects how bizarrely our commercially-programmed minds work when it comes to what is accepted and what isn’t…a friend of a friend heard that I was thinking of putting stevia in my toothpaste and wanted to be sure I knew that there are some studies that show it can interfere with thyroid function. Now, I totally appreciate the heads up, since I have a wonky thyroid, but why is it that a friend of a friend would warn me about trace amounts of stevia in my mouth and its theoretical possible effect on my thyroid but not warn me about, you know, toothpaste, which is basically made out of a number of actually poisonous ingredients?)

I’m sure most of you have heard of the whole Pepsi Refresh campaign and how they’re giving away MILLIONS of dollars to worthy organizations. Well, it just so happens that you can sign up this month to receive daily reminders to vote for a slate of projects run by progressive organizations trying to make systemic changes, like educating/mobilizing young and minority voters, solving the housing crisis for low-income communities, and training thousands of people to be leaders in the clean energy movement.

Here is all the info you need to join the Progressive Slate and get voting today. There’s plenty of August left. You have the ability to make a HUGE impact ($750,000 funneled into broad programs that have the power to permanently shift policy in the direction we desperately need it to be going). Do it. DOOOOOO IT!!!!!!

Update: They are doing it again in September and have a TON more voters this month–so if you missed out on the fun last month, this is the time to join!!

In the meantime, enjoy Li’l Miss showing off. I guess she figured out that you’re supposed to smile for a camera.

The coolest thing about Kristyn’s shop is that once she has helped you find the exact look you want, she literally cooks up your customized makeup on the spot! It’s pretty neat to watch it all come together and actually see what is going into the products that you’ll be putting on your face. A little avocado oil here, a few minerals there and voila! A perfect palette all for me. See how pretty?

The make-up brand is GIELLA, and it is some seriously luxurious stuff! I’m sure you can guess that I’m not exactly a connoisseur when it comes to all things beauty-related, but I have in my life made the rounds of free gift bags from the major department store cosmetic companies, and this stuff blows them out of the water! I put it on in the morning and it all just sort of magically illuminates my face while also looking/feeling like I’m seriously not wearing a thing. I just love it and I am VERY glad I decided to treat myself to a little pampering (and just in time before we do our Larms-inspired budget crack-down in September).

Now the problem is how I keep from pampering myself TOO often there…I already want to go back to try some of the Naturopathica facial products she carries (I sampled the Oat Facial Polish and loooooved it). And of course to get her to help me upgrade my all-purpose schlepping bag (currently a cringe-inducing canvas tote) into something a bit more stylish–because naturally her shop is also stocked with adorable and reasonably priced bags and jewelry, too!

(Of course, all the opinions here are my own and Kristyn did not offer me any compensation in return for my rave review. I can’t help but gush–she and her products charmed the pants off me. Also, I just think it’s a great thing to support local businesses owned by real people rather than corporate-bots. And obviously, someday I’ll graduate to making all these things myself out of nothing but baking soda and vinegar, but in the meantime, it was really nice to give myself this rare treat!)

Being able to see credit card/bank transactions and categorize them as soon as they’re made is awesome (I think if I can commit to doing that, we might be able to be trusted to go back to using our credit/debit cards for everything!). It definitely caters to the all-electronic set. One downside is that not all banks are hooked up to it – some of our savings are at a rinky-dink local bank, and my retirement accounts are in a weird industry-specific fund, so I can’t hook up to either of those. It would be nice for the bigger picture but hardly critical for day-to-day budgeting. It took awhile to set up all our accounts and get the budget categories how I wanted them, but I think it was worth it.

I did also check out pear budget, after reading some reviews that it was easy-to-use and no-frills, and while it did seem to be both of those things, it was SO no-frills I’m not sure I’d pay $3 a month for it – you could accomplish the same thing with some very basic spreadsheet skillz yourself (mint.com is free, there is just some advertising on it – I haven’t found it annoying so far). Having to personally enter every receipt would be my downfall – the glory of mint.com is just logging in once a week or whatever and categorizing any transactions, many of which will automatically show up in the correct category anyway all by themselves! Oh, wonder of wonders!

Okay, it’s not that reading this article made me think we didn’t actually need to worry about it. But up until this point it has made me feel better about the fact that there is no way we are ever going to pull our heads out of our collective you-know-whats and actually stop this thing. I could swallow our impending and massive failure in that regard by telling myself that when the bad thing happens (and it is so going to happen), we will totally be able to handle it using our special carbon-eating light sabers and faux-algae ocean covers.

Tragically, however, this piece reminds me that we are a very, very long way from there with no clear plan (or political will, apparently) to point us in the right direction. We can call it Lesson Five in our slow but steady quest to better understand the economics of climate change.

Now excuse me while I cry myself to sleep.

Anyway, she woke up from her nap a miserable wreck and totally stuffy from some freak mid-summer bug, so I decided it was finally time to break out a home remedy I’ve heard raves about from a coworker…garlic infused olive oil. She swears that’s what always worked wonders for her kids, and the interwebs seem to concur that this is a totally valid and very effective treatment. Garlic has got antiseptic properties that will actually help fight the infection and associated pain. For many minor infections it can apparently eliminate the need for antibiotics entirely. This article has a lot of good explanations of the mechanisms and variations on the recipe you can try. At the end it also describes how you can massage the ear/neck to help the oil work its magic. (I did as much as I could, but she didn’t have much patience for that part.)

I have no idea how well it worked our first go-round, since I can’t say for certain the ears were the problem. (She actually does understand most things now, but she’s in a phase where she answers “No” to every question that isn’t, “Do you want a strawberry?” or “Do you want to hold my phone?”) I can say, however, that by 30 minutes after we administered the drops she was in good spirits the rest of the night and went down for bed no problem (the basic ear infection litmus test in this household and many others, I’m sure!).

Yet another simple recipe that can’t hurt and definitely might help many of you out there. At the very least it’s something you can try in the middle of the night when you’re wondering how you’ll all live until morning when the doctor’s office opens and you can get your paws on the sweet relief of Amoxicillin!

(Three things to stress, safety-wise: 1) Don’t put garlic directly in or on the ear because it will burn something fierce. That’s why you dilute it in oil first. 2) Make sure the oil is at body temperature when you use it–not too hot or cold, but just right. 3) And finally, never put any kind of drops in the ear if the eardrum has already ruptured–you’ll know that happens if blood or pus is leaking out. But good news! In that case the pain is gone too! That actually happened to me once in college. I thought I was having an aneurysm and would die alone in a dorm hallway, but luckily it was just my eardrum and I can tell you the relief has never been so sweet as when that baby finally popped!)

We’ll start with the most straight-forward option (which, as usual, is also the best choice). Composting is ideal, it turns out. It takes the food straight out of your kitchen and puts it back into the ground as nutrient-rich soil. The process does produce carbon dioxide, but there are worse/more byproducts out there (see below) and at least you’re getting something extremely useful out of it.

If you can’t compost (or don’t want to, more accurately, since everyone “can” compost, technically), the next best thing is the garbage disposal, but it is not a close second by any measure. It depends largely on how the water treatment plant nearest you functions. Here is the Philadelphia Water Department’s own description of how they treat organic waste in our water:

Secondary Treatment. Secondary treatment uses biological processes to remove organic materials – materials from living organisms – still dissolved or suspended in the wastewater after primary treatment. The wastewater is combined with activated sludge, material containing the same microorganisms, or “microbes,” that decompose sewage in nature. The wastewater and activated sludge are aerated with air and mixed together in aeration tanks.

This creates an ideal environment for the microorganisms to “eat” the organics. The wastewater from the aeration tanks then flows to the final sedimentation tanks. Wastewater slowly flows through these tanks, allowing the solids to settle. The settled solids, secondary sludge, are pumped to another process where they are thickened to 4% to 5% and then pumped to the digesters. Just before reaching the river, the water is mixed with enough chlorine* to kill any remaining disease-causing organisms. The EPA requires 85% removal of suspended solids from wastewater. The treated water that leaves the plant – called effluent – is even cleaner than that.

The digested sludge from the Northeast Plant is barged 12 miles down the Delaware River and up the Schuylkill to the Biosolids Recycling Center where it is thickened, or dewatered, to 25% to 30% solids. After dewatering, the biosolids may be composted, land applied or landfilled off-site.

As you can see, some of the organic “sludge” (formerly your banana peel), does get composted, but they don’t say how much (although later in the article they say that “most” gets recycled). And of course, that whole process initially releases a whole bunch of methane at the plant and then I would assume still produces a significant amount of carbon dioxide when it’s actually composted. Some water treatment plants capture a good deal of their methane and reuse it to power/heat the plant. I did not see evidence of this on Philadelphia’s water site, but I also did not call to check–one would assume they would want to brag about it prominently if it were happening, though.

The worst choice is putting your food waste into the garbage can. As we all have heard a million times, landfills often prevent any sort of useful decomposition, since no oxygen actually gets to the stuff in there. (Although the website for the company I most often see driving around Philly has a lot of pages of PR stuff about how green and sustainable they are…including capturing methane, so maybe landfills have made more progress than we assume from our childhood days!) Another problem I found listed on a number of sites is that the more food waste in your garbage, the wetter it is. And the wetter trash is, the more likely it is to help someone else’s hazardous waste (because we all dispose of our paint thinner and batteries properly, of course) leach from the landfill into the ground and then into our water supply.

I should note, here, though, that although composting was the unchallenged winner in this battle, there was some disagreement across the interwebs about how much better a garbage disposal is than the garbage can. Some sites actually recommended the trash as a better option because of the extra water used by the disposal and the strain the organic waste can put on your city’s sewage system. And if you think about it, if your city’s water plant sends most of its organic sludge to the landfill, you’re really just adding a middle man with more opportunities for inefficiency/waste. So probably, if you are not going to compost, the most responsible thing to do would be to compare the processes for your own municipality’s water treatment and waste removal services and go with the one that is most environmentally cutting edge.

When you think of it that way, though, isn’t it just far easier to compost?

So there you have it. Composting is best. Garbage disposals are second best (by many accounts). And landfills should be used only as a last resort (in many cases). Oh, but I almost forgot (and this one is for you, Larms!): Incinerating is the absolute worst choice. Don’t do that. (And I of course don’t mean to imply that Larms burns her trash, but it’s possible that she knows people who do.)

For my part, I’ll be signing up for the curbside compost pick-up next month, folding it seamlessly into our family’s new budget that I’ll be creating around that time, thanks to the help of Larms and our savvy readers! I’m thinking when Li’l Miss is old enough to appreciate learning about the process, we can add a worm bin to the mix at home, but for now I know that would only be a drop in our organic waste bucket and take up time and floor space I just don’t have.

Up next month (which is actually just later this month because we still need June’s topic and we’re already in July): What about paper? Should it be recycled or composted?

And because this song has been going through my head the entire time I’ve been writing this post, I have to leave you with some classic Sesame Street:

*As an unrelated aside, just as a public service announcement: They also must chlorinate our drinking water to kill germs that would spread typhoid and such (and I use “must” loosely because there are other ways to do it, it’s just that chlorine is the cheapest). This is a good thing in that we don’t get typhoid, but it is a bad thing in that the chlorine will give some of us, at some point in our lives, cancer and/or other health problems. This is a trade-off the EPA is willing to accept, not unwisely probably. But it is also why you should really filter your tap water before drinking it. Although this article (promoting filters, natch) is making me want a dechlorinating filter for my shower head something fierce, too.