My brilliant friend Charlie Fern tagged me for a very popular meme: 7 things you didn’t know about me.

Frankly, I can’t believe there are really 7 things you don’t know about me if you’ve been reading for a while. I get pimples. I’ve never acquired the habit of brushing my teeth before I go to bed. I wear weird clothes while working at home, eat bizarre food and have an obsession with cupcakes, which I can’t eat because of my obsession with running.  I’ve even shown you what I keep on my desk and in my fridge.

Oh, I even told you I was the sexiest woman on the planet. Actually, Google (at least searching from this computer) tells me that I’m second, just behind Scarlett Johansson. Not kidding. Try it!

So, Charlie told me I needed to tell you 7 things that you didn’t know. I decided to modify the meme to tell you 7 green-ish things you didn’t know about me. (Please keep in mind that this doesn’t include my horrible non-green secrets. I’m sitting here with a disposable paper cup of coffee. I should be shot.)

1. Green coffee
   My sister and I both add our creamer first before the coffee so we don’t have to waste a spoon to stir. If someone else has poured the coffee for us, we blow on the top to mix the coffee with wind power. Also, when necessary, I hunt for the broken stirrers in coffeeshops to make sure they aren’t thrown away, and sometimes I touch a lot of clean stirrers to get to the broken ones. I’m sorry about that. I also recycle my sweetener packet* paper.
2. Green laundry
   Since I don’t get very dirty sitting at this computer all day, I wear the same clothes for several days in a row. I don’t do the same with workout clothes. That would be too much, even for me.
3. Compost
   I ADORE composting. One of the reasons I was so enamored with my boyfriend D.J. right from the start is that he not only recycled… he composted! I save every scrap I can in a container in my fridge, and I take it to him. We broke up last year for about a month, and I was left with compost in the fridge. This made me so sad. When we got back together, I refused to start another compost container until I knew it was going to last. Now when I hand him the compost, he says, “Woohoo! I’m in!”
4. Green roots
   At the University of North Texas in the late ’80s, I’m proud to say I was on the first recycling committee. I even requested that our newspaper stop producing so many copies since so many were left each day. This decreased our advertising power. But they did it anyway.
5. Litter
   I try to pick up litter if it’s in my path, but I have one really, really strict rule: If I actually TOUCH the litter, I am 100 percent obligated to find a trash can. If I touch it then drop it again, I am the horrible litterbug.
6. Green judging
   Ohh, I’m a horrible person. If I go to your house and you don’t recycle, I judge you. I can barely date a man who doesn’t make that a priority (but I have — one must make hay while the sun shines). I even have trouble keeping my mouth shut when I visit client offices. I ask politely, “Do you recycle?” If they say, “No, just toss it,” I can hardly stand it. Recycling is SO easy, people. A little effort, please?
7. Reusing bags
   Again, I’m dreadful. I’m too impulsive a shopper, and I ALWAYS forget my reusable bags when I go shopping. So I ask for paper and use the paper bags to collect the recycling around the house (I keep a bag in every room to make sure I don’t get lazy). If it’s just a few items, I carry them out. The other day I used my chin to hold a 1-foot stack of cat food while I held a box of hair color* in one hand and a half gallon of soy milk in the other. I don’t recommend it.

Now I’m supposed to tag 7 more people to write 7 things on their blogs, but you’ll feel guilty if you don’t do it. Instead, add your green things below. What little green (or non-green) quirks do you have? I’ll try not to judge, and maybe we’ll all get some great new ideas on how to do something little that adds up to something big.

* I know I’m not supposed to use hair dye or consume artificial sweeteners. Bad for the environment and bad for me. But I’d be a fat chick with gray hair if I didn’t, and I prefer to remain the sexiest woman on the planet. I’m sure you understand.

By Guest Blogger Mary from Simply Forties

I am honored to have been asked by Beth to be her second guest poster.   She gave me carte blanche as to subject and length of post.  What power!  It’s been a pleasure.

I was watching Bill Nye’s program, Stuff Happens, on Planet Green the other day.  He did a segment on cashmere.  Cashmere, as I’m sure you know, is a completely natural fiber obtained from the Cashmere goat.  Cashmere goats are not sheared like a sheep, they molt or shed their winter coats in the Spring and the fibers are collected or, in some cases, combed out.  What could be more natural, more green, more eco-friendly than that?

If you’ve ever had a cashmere sweater or scarf or robe, you know why everyone loves cashmere.  Therein lies the rub.  Everyone loves cashmere!  As a result of the popularity of cashmere, the Cashmere goat raisers, who run their charges on the outskirts of the Gobi, are expanding their flocks at a rapid rate.  Goats are voracious eaters and efficient brush clearers. Since goats like to eat from the top down, areas where goats forage will have a “browse line” below which virtually everything is cleared off.  The grasslands that border the Gobi are being stripped away, allowing the desert to expand by leaps and bounds.  Maybe cashmere is not so green after all.

So let’s see.  Cotton, a renewable natural fiber, is grown on plants that are sprayed with pesticides.  They grow a lot of cotton around here, in this desert, and I can tell you that the fields are heavily irrigated and, after the harvest, stripped and left bare for the soil to blow away during the windy season.  That doesn’t seem so green either.  Wool comes from sheep, which means it is also a renewable fiber.  Sheep, like cows, emit an appreciable amount of methane gas every day.  Methane is a particularly worrisome greenhouse gas.  Producing wool also requires a vast amount of water—not only to raise and care for the sheep, but also to rid the raw wool of numerous impurities. It takes approximately 500,000 liters of water to manufacture a metric ton of wool; this figure is even higher when the sheep in question are fed in confined quarters, where extra water is required to manage the manure.

I remember a few years ago when it seemed like every other news report was of yet another food that was going to give us cancer.  When it was just a few, we were able to make good choices and avoid the ones that were reported to be cancer-causing.  Then it began to seem as though all foods were problematic; the water we drank was dangerous; even the air we breathed.  The result?  I know I threw up my hands and said there were no good choices.  I gave up and ate what I wanted.  I’m sure I was not alone in feeling helpless about what to do.

While we all want to make informed, environmentally friendly choices, I’m afraid this “under the microscope” look at all aspects of the production of the products we use every day is going to lead us to decide that we can make no completely responsible choices.  We may stop trying.  I don’t know what the answer is in this world of information overload.  In fact I like having a lot of information at my fingertips.  I’m just not so sure this is going in the right direction.  As we become more and more concerned about the environmental impact of everything we do, which is a good thing, I’m afraid we may become overwhelmed and give up.

What about you?  Are you starting to feel a bit overwhelmed and unsure about your choices?  I know I am.

Hi!  I’m Mary from Simply Forties,  a 47-year old single mother of a college-aged son.  I write about the topics that interest me most as I make my way through my forties – finances, the environment, social responsibility and, sometimes, relationships and dealing with grown children. I hope you’ll stop by my blog and look around.  You can also find me every other Thursday over at 5 Minutes for Going Green.

Yea! The Green It! Carnival at Green Me just included my post called “I Moved My Toilet Paper Roll” in their new edition.

I’m particularly fond of the link about worm composting from SimplyForties. I’ve always wanted a worm composting bin!

My desk sits 10 feet from my front door, and each day I see the postal person making rounds. I sigh when I receive a big packet of local ads almost every day, and those go directly into the recycle bin.

I was under the impression that the postal people just had a pile that they had to give out to each household, so I asked the deliverer to stop blessing me with the flyers.

Turns out they’re all individually addressed, so he’s legally required to deliver them! But here’s the great part…. he showed me that each packet has the name, address and website of the distributor, usually buried on the outside cover that holds together all the looseleaf ads. Yesterday I dug through my recycle bin and found three different distributors, and I wrote to all to remove my name.

Yahoo!

My goal in the next week or so is to create a little flyer for my neighbors, telling them how they, too, can unsubscribe and identifying the sites and addresses they need. Wouldn’t it be wonderful if the post people could skip the flyers for my whole block?!?

Gosh but I love reducing paper waste…. (I know — proof yet again that I need to get out more).

A couple of other green tips:

Want to get rid of catalogs and other junk mail? Check out GreenDimes.

Aveda salons are collecting the caps from plastic bottles, etc. — Not many recycling systems will take them.