Not easy bein’ green - Part 1

Okay, actually it is fairly easy to be green these days. Or at least greener.

There are a lot of things we can all do without much effort. And most of us aren’t doing them. Some things there are really no good excuse for: Like using plastic bags. Every grocery store and its’ brothers all sell those cloth re-usable bags for 99c.

Just think, Kroger gives you 4c credit every time you use one of your own bags! This means in a mere 27 trips you will have paid off your bag. (I’m counting the 9c of tax in there, too.) In that same 27 trips you will have discovered that your cloth bag holds twice as much as a single plastic bag, and never needs to be double bagged. Was this accounted for in that 4c? Or am I getting gypped?

Nevermind. I’m saving the environment. And I can sling my grocery bag over my shoulder, can you? As South Park so aptly put it, I am no longer creating ‘smog’ I have moved up to creating ‘smug’. Five more baby ducks will survive to adulthood because I brought my bags today. And I got 20c!

In that same 27 trips to earn back the price of your bags, you will also walk an extra five miles. ‘Huh?’ You say, ‘how is that?’ Some of you are better at this than me and you will never make the extra five miles, but me, I clock the time: Going back to my car to get the bags out of the trunk.

I started to give my kids a quarter every time they remembered the bags, thus greatly increasing my number of trips before the bags are paid off, BUT greatly decreasing my number of trips back to the car. Unfortunately, my kids suck at it as bad as I do. Basically, I’m never going to earn back the cost of the insulated bag for milk and ice cream, but I will continue being smug.

There are other things to do, too. Sara Snow, on ‘Get Fresh’, (https://www.singledad.com/home-and-cooking/articles/Sara_Snow_s_Simple_Steps_to_Live_Green_1214980981.php) tells us to unplug things. Everything. My Dad’s a physicist and he disagrees with Sara. He points out that non-transformer plugs don’t draw a current unless the thing is on. So who cares? And you sure don’t want to unplug it while you’re using it.

But what about transformer plugs? (Those bulky black boxes that make it impossible to plug anything into the other socket in the outlet.) I hear they’re evil! Some conservationists/granola-nut-jobs call them ‘vampires’ because they suck so much energy.

I was going around the house unplugging them while my father laughed at me. He said the hairdryer might draw 2c of electricity in a month. Well, I’m joining up with Sara Snow then: I want my 2c! Again, (*sigh*) this is followed by a sentence that starts ‘unfortunately’.
Unfortunately, there were only 4 things to unplug. I can’t unplug the phone. It doesn’t even work without the base plugged in, let alone take messages. I won’t unplug my computer because I would go clinically insane waiting for Windows to start up every time I sat down. Sometimes Yahoo is just too slow for me. And I understand that we should unplug the TV every night before bed - Sara wants to know who is watching TV at 3 AM. TiVo is, that’s who! I can’t miss an old episode of ‘House’! So TV stays plugged.

But I’ve done what I can. I’ve reduced my electric bill by 96c per year!
Ahhhh, the satisfaction of a job well done.