Shopping

My wife really likes candles. The problem is that most candles are made out of petroleum. As I'm sure you know petroleum is not exactly environmentally friendly and takes millions of years to make. We need to reduce out dependence on this industry, so cutting using soy candles instead is a nice start.

Soy candles last significantly longer (up to three times) than petroleum based candles. Other types of natural candles, such as beeswax, can also claim long burn times, but soy is the most cost effective. Soy candles are also cleaner. While their might be a little soot, you should not have the thick black soot that you have with petroleum based candles. Petroleum candles can actually put out more smog than a car.

Candles are great, but can be a very dirty light source. If we are going to help clean up our environment, we have to look at every thing we do. Are our candles clean? Is our dish washer efficient? Are our cleaners phosphate free? There are so many things that we need to keep in mind. It would be nice if the manufacturers would do a little more to make sure that we get eco-friendly products, but we can't wait for them. We have to do it ourselves. A simple thing to do, if you burn candles, is make sure you use soy candles.

If you are a retailer, consider loosing your smog producing stock and replacing it all with soy. Wholesale soy candles are inexpensive and a great alternative to your current stock of petroleum based candles. The more we support the local farmers who farm the soy and the more we stop using products from the oil industry, the cleaner our environment will be. We are shepherds of the Earth.

Printing can be very wasteful. The paper comes from trees, petroleum based inks let out volatile organic compounds (VOCs) that can damage the environment and the process of making paper is not very pleasant. But when we need to do brochure printing or business cards printing, or whatever else we need to print on paper, our businesses need to be able to do that. Without everyone using a PDA of some sort, there is no way to go completely paperless. What are we to do in order to keep our business and personal needs met and still keep our environmentally sound desires satiated?

Of course, the ideal of a paperless society is a long way off, and we may never get there. We can't produce enough sustainable wood products to meet all of our paper demands, but there are a few things we can do to help reduce the environmental impact. We can make sure our printers use recycled materials and we know what type of recycled material they use, we can make sure they use soy based ink, instead of petroleum based inks and we can make sure their paper comes from a mill that uses less water, contains their waste, and uses fewer volatile chemicals in their production of paper. We, as consumers, need to hold our printers to green printing practices.

There are two types of recycled material for paper, pre-consumer and post-consumer. Pre-consumer recycled material means that the wood chips from the wood mills (ie, sawdust, etc) is used in the production of the paper. This is good to use, but not a big shift from what they were already doing. The better type of recycled material is that used post-consumer. That means that you and I read the paper, we then put it into the recycling bin, it gets carried to the mill where it is shredded, pulped, and turned into new paper. A certain amount of pre-consumer wood is usually used to give it more strength, but we want a high amount of post-consumer paper used as well.

VOCs are damaging to the environment. Besides, we need to cut our reliance on unsustainable materials, like petroleum. Soy is a better solution. You can shred up the paper with soy based inks and feed it to your worms, spread it on your compost pile for bulk, use it as cat litter or bedding for small animals and much more. All these things would be dangerous with petroleum based inks.

The first two options are easy for you to check into. The last is not so easy. We often do not know what the mills do. We do not know if they dump their hot, chemically laden water into the river their next to. We don't know even what mill the paper came from most of the time. As consumers, there is not much we can do here, but the business owners that deal with these mills can insist on clean practices. They can refuse to work with mills that do not lead environmentally sound practices. And they can let us consumers know that they expect their partners to follow environmentally sound practices. The problem is, they need to define what is environmentally sound. What they call environmentally sound, I may not agree is such a great practice, but that is another article.

With the government mandating that all television broadcast must be digital by February, it leaves many of us wondering if we need to buy a new television. Our TV was purchased in 1991, so is not digital. Our VCR and DVD players are much newer, but I confirmed that neither of them have digital receivers. So I'm looking for a new TV.

I've looked at the local places and can get a decent one for around $500-$700. A bit more than I want to spend, but if I can manage to save up the money, I will. I thought I'd look at some of the large plasma screens that are available. If I'm going to spend that kind of money, I might as well spend a little more and get a really cool screen.

I found a 46" Sharp Plasma Screen for $750. It is just a little more than the 36" I was looking at for $700 and a lot bigger. But this is really out of my price range. I would love to have a screen like that, it would be awesome to watch Veggie Tales on a big screen TV with Dolby 5.1 surround sound, but I plan on spending that money on stuff I can do to keep Emma active, rather than sitting on the couch. I've sent away for the converter box coupons. The converter box costs about $60 and the coupons are for $40. That means that 46" screen will cost $730 more than the converter box. Maybe some day I'll get the big TV, but we don't watch TV enough to pay for cable, let alone a big TV.

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Halloween is a very fun holiday. You get to dress up and play like you are something you are not. Since I accepted Christ into my life, I've wondered about some of the ideas behind Halloween. I've decided that it is a fun family time, as long as you keep it a celebration of those that have passed and not of witchcraft and pagan values. For most, it is just a fun family time, it is just a few that can taint the otherwise enjoyable holiday.

Halloween costumes are a lot of fun and something I want to be able to enjoy with my family. We usually don't dress up, but we dress up Emma. I am trying to talk Elizabeth into dressing up this year. She has suggested dressing the dog up, so I think I can talk her into dressing up too. Now that I'm a teacher, I think I should at least dress up for my students.

Emma wants to be Cinderella for Halloween. She loves Cinderella. Elizabeth wants to dress Marley up as a clown. Elizabeth suggested that I should be Emma's Prince Charming. She says "If I dress up, I would want to be the fairy godmother, but we need to do costumes, and that is not easy."

This is true. Dressing up can be a lot of fun though. We just need to plan exactly what it is we want and then go find it. If you like, you can go to a costume store, and they may have exactly what you want. You can also look at thrift stores and even just around the house for what you want.

I was given a link to a site for more furniture. I realize that I am not going to get anything for a while, but it is still fun to look. Once again, in looking at the prices I was taken aback by the amount one is expected to spend for furniture. I don't want to spend much, maybe I'm just too frugal to spend that much, but I like to be able to eat as well.

Well, if you buy a dining room table what are the chances you will be buying another one any time soon? They are a once a decade, or less, type purchase. So spending a little extra a getting the one that you are going to be happy with for the next 10 or 20 or 30 or more years makes since.

Are the ones there going to do it for you? I can't answer that, you will need to look around and see. I saw some dining room tables I liked all right, and some I did not. I happen to like the dining table we have, so I'm unlikely to get another, but perhaps you need one and can find something cool that will make you happy.

Sometimes we need to buys something and we want to make sure we get the best deal. We can shop all around, looking from store to store, wasting time and gas. We can also shop from site to site. In this way we save gas, but it can still take a lot of time. Another option is to use a shopping comparison site that links to a bunch of different e-retailers.

This last option can save a lot of time, as you only have to look in one place, but they usually only link to retailers that will pay them for the products. This means that if the shopping comparison site does not get a commission, they will not tell you about it. They need to make a profit after all. I recently found a shopping comparison site that claims to link to anyone and everyone that sells a product. Shopwiki doesn't require them to have an affiliate program.

As usual when I hear about something I think my readers will like, I need to research it and tell what I find. I've been wanting some bamboo towels, so I first searched for "bamboo towel". I found 343 results. I thought "a lot of these are part cottom, I'm only interested in 100% bamboo." So I added "-cotton" to the search. To my joy (and suprise) it came back with only 200 results. So it understands the minus operator. Nice.

They also allow you to limit by price, which a lot of sites do. In the searches I checked, it was accurate. I then noticed that you could limit by color. It is a full color bar that you can choose any color. I'm not sure how it works, but I picked the darkest blue I could find and then looked at the five results:

1. The first came only in beige
2. The second said "Product not found!"
3. The third came in a blue
4. So did the fourth
5. The fifth was a set of trays, not a towel

So, the color match needs work.

Next, I checked out the Pacific Northwest Guide. This was part of their Outdoor and Garden Shopping Guides section. I expected to find a bunch of links to products that are specific to gardeners in this region. What I found instead was a page with information about gardening in the region, with no purchase links at all. Now the information was stereotypical saying that we are so wet our seeds might float away and that we never have to worry about drought. Well, we are in a drought right now and have one many summers. We do get plenty of rain, but there are some places known for being sunny that get more rain than we do (Florida for instance). They also totally leave out the deserts on the east end of the state. This wiki could use some work, but they do provide a space for some good information and I am impressed with that.