The Beginning

I've always been annoyed at waste. I remember being a kid and thinking what a waste it was to package things the way they did at the grocery store. When Jeff and I got married, we recycled glass bottles, and we tried to recycle white paper, but it was hard to do much more than that while living in a tiny apartment. When we finally moved into a house (May 2006), we were able to do curb-side recycling, and we've been recycling as much as we possibly can. We recycle more than half of our solid waste.

Last night I started thinking about how much we've tried to "go green" since being in the house in San Antonio, and I realized how much we've done only in the last four to six months or so. Thus, I decided to start this blog as a sort of journal of where we've come from, and how we're trying to ever improve.

I hope this green kick that I'm on not only lasts for me, but also catches on with the population in this country. It's really not as hard as it seems. I realized recently that "Reduce, Reuse, Recycle" doesn't just mean "Recycle." And I read somewhere that you're supposed to follow those instructions in the order given: recycling is the last part -- reduce and reuse first. It seems like so much is disposable nowadays that the first two Rs just go hand in hand.

After my first taste of reducing and reusing, I caught the bug, but I didn't know how to proceed. I got online in hopes of finding some pointers on easy ways to live green, but all I found were either things I was already doing, which I really didn't consider green living (i.e. don't waste food by buying too much because you went to the grocery store hungry) or ultra-hippie, and let's face it, I'm not going to stop using toilet paper. And I'm not going to use an old t-shirt as a diaper (yes, I did read that on treehugger.com, which I am now done with for all but humor).

All I did was to stop and think about what I was using and throwing away every day and how that would add up over the course of a year. Once I could identify the waste, it has been easy to correct it little by little so far. God wants us to take care of the Earth -- let's do it!