LILL’s LIST

Even though there’s still over a foot of snow outside, my spring cleaning alarm went off. I spent most of yesterday doing tasks that I’ve neglected during my winter slump. Floors, bathrooms, dust bunny wrangling, cobweb removal and cleaning handprints from just about every vertical or horizontal surface in the house - I was a human dynamo. What’s really amazing is that I accomplished it all with a broom, a dustpan, cleaning cloths, a basin and two cleaners: Dr. Bronner’s Hemp-Citrus Liquid Glycerine Soap and Dr. Bronner’s Sal Suds.

Unlike the toilet cleaners that are advertised on tv, Dr. Bronner’s Sal Suds won’t make you dizzy if you use it without ventilation. Well, I should qualify that by saying you might get a little swoony if you read the stuff he says on the label, but you can skip that. The stuff does have spruce and pine oil in it, so you won’t want to drink it or take a bath in it, but it smells really nice and does a very good job of cleaning, and it wouldn’t kill you if you did drink it.

For the hard water stains in the toilet bowls, I resorted to elbow grease with a pumice stone on a stick, something that I found at a local hardware store. Not only does it do a great job of removing stains, but I get some much-needed exercise too. It also sparked a conversation between my daughter and I about volcanic rock and minerals in water so it was an educational exercise too.

The Sal Suds is good for floors -  wooden, vinyl or any other non-porous surface -  and you can also use it for laundry, surface cleaning, washing your car or anywhere you’d use a general purpose cleaner. I use it like a laundry pre-treater to remove stains.

The Citrus Liquid Glycerine Soap smells like you just cut into an orange and it’s very good for cleaning greasy dishes, but you can use it the same way you’d use any liquid soap. I keep it next to the sink and use it for handwashing, dishwashing, for washing delicate fabrics and even for counters and floors, when I’m in too much of a hurry to go get the Sal Suds that I left down in the laundry room.

Other than baking soda and white vinegar, that’s the extent of my cleaning supplies. When I happen to catch a glimpse of what other people keep under their sinks, I’m amazed that they feel that they need so many cans and bottles, most of which have warning labels on them. And most of them also contain petroleum, something we’re running out of and need to get away from.

If you believe the ads on tv and in magazines, your house isn’t clean until it’s been Swiffered, sprayed, waxed, disinfected, air freshened and slathered with enough petroleum products to equal a quart of motor oil. Why, according to the companies that make all of this, a person would have to be pretty simple to believe that a handful of non-toxic cleaners could do everything those specialized products can do.

Well, simple I may be, but I’m not stupid. All of this stuff is promoted as something that will make housework easier and faster, when in fact it makes it more complicated and time-consuming. My house is clean enough for us, not for a magazine ad. It smells clean, thanks to the Sal Suds, the Citrus Glycerine Soap and the fresh air that we let in through the open windows for a few minutes a day even in winter.

Of course, the worst part about all this is the damage all of these products are doing to us and to our environment. I feel strongly that we all need to take a good hard look at what we have under our sinks and in our bathrooms and think about whether cleaning our homes with toxic  chemicals is worth our health and our planet.

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A wise woman once said something to me that makes a lot of sense. She said if you have something critical to say about someone, you should always sleep on it and see if you feel the same way the next morning. But, she told me, if you have something nice to say, say it right away so that you don’t forget or get sidetracked.

I have something nice to say about two people whose blogs have taught me a lot. Kathy at Safe Mama and Karen at Best of Mother Earth. I subscribe to both of their blogs and they’re two of the few blogs that I always read. (Another one is Bore Me To Tears.)

Yesterday, Kathy’s blog had a very important post on 1,4-Dioxane in Organic Body Care Products. If you haven’t read it, please do for your sake and your family’s sake. Thanks to this post, I’ll be making some big changes in the products I buy, because some of my longtime favorites were on the list.

And then there’s Karen’s blog, where I learned that there’s nitrate-free brisket for St. Patrick’s Day corned beef dinner. Where I’ve found recommendations for so many things that have become staples at our house and where I’ve laughed out loud at her humor and upbeat outlook on life.  It’s like reading a friend’s journal.

So, thanks, you two, for blogging about things that you care about and please don’t stop. And now I need to go check the bathrooms for unsafe personal care products and  then rummage through the food cupboards to make sure I have everything I need for making corned beef hash from the leftover brisket.

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Lill’s List is now in the Green category at alltop.com along with some other very good eco-sites. Like the other alltop.com categories, Guy Kawasaki has attracted the cream of the crop and some other sites that I hadn’t heard of until they showed up on Alltop’s radar. Now, several of them have become regular stops on my daily trip around the Green web.

I’ve found that Green at Alltop goes very well with organic Irish Breakfast tea and whole wheat toast spread with Irish butter and homemade wild Maine blueberry jam. It’s also where I found a green site with a link to a green maven. Well, it is St. Patrick’s Day, but that’s not why this maven is green. This Green Maven is a search engine you can use to find websites, products and services that are environmentally responsible. It’s where I started my search for lodging for my annual spring trip.

Every year, around my birthday, Daughter and I take a trip to VT and NH. Money is an issue, especially this year when gas prices and everything else are rising faster than Geekdaddy’s paycheck and my freelance pittance. My challenge is to find a place to stay at a price we can afford. In addition to that though, if I can, I’d like to stay where the owners care about the environment as much as they care about their guests.

I was some chuffed when my search turned up a whole page of helpful links to hotels, motels, inns and B&Bs. In what I took for an auspicious sign from the Travel Gods, the first link was for sustainable lodging in NH. Within minutes, I had found the perfect motel in the area we plan to visit. What’s more, the price was well within my budget and about the same as a major chain motel would be.

Of course, we’ll have to eat, so I clicked on the Sustainable NH dining link and found some eco-conscious eateries in the area. I noticed that there were plenty of vegetarian and vegan options, although that’s not a consideration for Daughter and I who are serious omnivores. (Pay no attention to the rumor that we’ve become chocolatarians. Why, it hardly makes up half of our diet when we’re on vacation.)

I’d like to say that we’ll be driving a new hybrid or electric car on our trip, but that’s still in the future for us. We try to make up for our not-so-great-on-gas-mileage car by only making one trip a week to do errands and hit the libraries, and by keeping our vacation trips down to two a year. Plus, we try to stay where we don’t need to use the car very often, and we walk whenever possible.

My dream for the future is to live where I don’t have to use a car to get to the basic necessities of life, but that’s not going to happen until we can get out from under the rapidly depreciating pile of sticks that pretends to shelter us from Maine’s weather tantrums. Until then, I’ll be as green as I can be in other ways and keep the car trips to a minimum. And I’ll stop in at Alltop.com to check out developments in the Eco-Sphere.

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