It's all apart of life's pageant

10 ways to go GREEN

While I am traveling to St Louis I wanted to share 10 ways to reduce your environmental impact (in honor of earth day!) - without giving up your modern ways! I pulled the ideas that I am going to work on from Ebay GreenTeam and Country Living.

1. Leave bar soap by the sink. BECAUSE: Most liquid soap comes in nonrenewable plastic packaging. Substituting one bottle with a bar in each US home would keep 2.5 million pounds of plastic out of landfills.
2. Put cloth napkins on the table. BECAUSE: Eliminating disposable napkins would keep 500,000 tons of paper-based trash out of landfills each year.
3. Donate your old cell phone to charity, or return it to the manufacturer for recylcling. BECAUSE: Electronic trash amounts to 70 percent of America's toxic waste. Check out: Mygreenelectronics
4. Read your water meter- check the meter, then wait an hour without using your faucets or toilets. Now check again. If the number rises during that time, call a plumber. BECAUSE: A dripping tap wastes five gallons of water a day. Fixing a leak can save at least $50 a year!
5. Register to get your name off junk-mail lists. BECAUSE: Printing junk mail wastes 100 million trees a year. Canceling can reduce your intake by 35 pounds a year. Sign up at dmachoice
6. Keep your freezer's temperature at 0 degrees F and your refrigerator between 35 and 38 degrees. BECAUSE: Adjusting a too-cold freezer by five degrees can cut it's energy use by 20 percent.
7. Scrub down your car at a car wash, not at home. BECAUSE: A drive through uses less than half the water per car than the typical do it yourselfer - and many establishments recycle their soap water.
8. Use soft-white compact fluorescent light bulbs (CFLs), not traditional incandescents. BECAUSE: If every American household replaced one standard bulb with a CFL, we could save enough energy to power three million homes a year.
9. Return wire hangers to the dry cleaner. BECAUSE: More than 3.5 billion hangers reach landfills each year, amounting to 200 million tons of steel that could be put to new use.
10. Consolidate your errands into fewer trips. BECAUSE: Economizing your tasks into just one or two runs each week can conserve as much as 55 gallons of gas over the course of a year.

88 years

Today marks 88 years that women have had the right to vote. It hasn't been very long - that is why it saddens me to learn that most women do not vote. Check out this site and learn the statistics for each state by clicking on it. Just in my state of Washington alone:

• 342,660 single women unregistered
• 190,124 single women registered, but didn't vote in 2006

Take some time to watch this movie, Iron Jawed Angels. I have talked about this movie before and how it opened my eyes to how important it is for women to vote. Remember we have voices that count!