Electrify Your Night

Here’s the Thing:

Use an electric blanket or mattress pad on your bed.

Plug in your bed!

This one comes to us from Jonathan in Boston, who’s too busy setting technology policy for MIT (and raising my niece and nephew) to write a silly little blog post. (For anyone who can find some time to write with us occasionally, click here!)

Many of the ideas on this blog focus on ways to minimize energy use, so pushing an electric blanket might seem a bit out of character — until you consider the savings to be had on the back side of this move, when you turn down the thermostat!

The truth is, I don’t know how well this equation works out. I’ve poked around on the Internets a bit and haven’t come up with too much on the difference between energy consumed by electric blankets and energy saved by lowering the home’s heat. My intuition tells me the blanket is probably a good idea, because you’re focusing a bit of heat on your body rather than heating lots of space around the house that nobody’s using. But alas, I can’t prove it. If anybody has any insight on this, please post!

Perhaps an even better idea is to just get a really really warm blanket for the bed that isn’t electric. No worries about safety, no worries about energy use, just good, clean, old-fashioned coziness.

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Oh, and here’s a little history on bed warmers, from Wikipedia:

The electric mattress pad, circa 1925

A bed warmer was a common household item in cold countries, especially Northern Europe. It consisted of a metal container, usually fitted with a handle and shaped somewhat like a modern frying pan, with a solid or finely perforated lid. The pan would be filled with hot coals and placed under the covers of a bed, to warm it up and/or dry it out before use.

After the invention of rubber, the classical bed warmer was largely supplanted by the hot water bottle, which is still widely used. In the late 20th century, electric blankets and then the electric bed warmer were invented to fulfill the same need.

Give Someone a Break

From Jill:

Sometimes things happen in life that stop us in our tracks, and things are left hanging. It doesn’t even have to be a big thing — life happens.

So give somebody a break today.

Send a President's Day Card to Your President

Here’s the Thing:

Tell your president what you’re thinking.

My brother’s favorite president is Grover Cleveland, because he ran for president as a bachelor but was secretly courting a 21-year-old college girl, whom he married shortly after taking office. He was 49 at the time.

Grover Cleveland… A smooth operator.

William Henry Harrison was U.S. president for 30 days. He caught a cold while delivering a 2-hour-plus inaugural address without an overcoat on an extremely cold and windy day, and eventually died of pneumonia and pleurisy. His final words, according to Wikipedia, were “Sir, I wish you to understand the true principles of the government. I wish them carried out. I ask nothing more.”

Many of today’s current presidents don’t seem to understand the true principles of government. Or perhaps they understand, they’re just not carrying them out. If you want your president — or any elected leaders for that matter — to act responsibly and uphold principles of justice, tell them so! It’s Presidents’ Day in the United States. Why not send your president a card to mark this momentous event?

I interned in the U.S. senate many years ago, and we read and responded to every piece of constituent mail, no matter how cooky. And we took every bit of mail seriously on the theory that if one person cared enough about something to write in about it, there were probably 99 more out there who didn’t take the time to write in.

So if there’s something going on in your country that you don’t agree with, maybe it’s time to tell your president. Grab a postcard, write your thoughts, and send it in.

If you’re in the U.S., here’s some key contact info for your president (well, the president, anyway.), taken from the Whitehouse.gov Web site:

Mailing Address The White House 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue NW Washington, DC 20500
Phone Numbers Comments: 202-456-1111 Switchboard: 202-456-1414 FAX: 202-456-2461	TTY/TDD Comments: 202-456-6213 Visitors Office: 202-456-2121

E-Mail
comments@whitehouse.gov
Vice President Richard Cheney: vice_president@whitehouse.gov

If you write to Cheney, please join my campaign to urge him not to shoot any more people in the face.

Take off Your Pants and Cough

Here’s the Thing:

Make an appointment for a medical checkup.

I can’t tell you how many people have said to me in recent weeks that they know they should go to the doctor but they just haven’t gotten around to it, or they haven’t been to the dentist in, well, you know, five years.

My teeth, in paperweight form.

Idiots.

Going to the doctor and dentist regularly will save you and me money and it could save your family and friends a heck of a lot of heartache.

I’ll give you my story first. It had been over two years since I’d seen a dentist when I finally got around to scheduling a checkup and cleaning last summer. Four fillings and two crowns later, I’m out 700 bucks, my insurance is maxed out at $3000 (over two calendar years), and I’ve wasted about seven Thursday afternoons getting shot up and drilled into. Plus, by maxing out my insurance, I’m doing my part to make sure rates stay high for everyone.

But that’s just teeth. The stuff going on inside your body can be hundreds of times worse. Cancers and other diseases seem to be crazy-common these days, and with a lot of this stuff, catching it early can be the difference between knocking it out quickly and living with it the rest of your life, or dying with it…soon. That difference can mean thousands of dollars for you, millions of dollars for insurance companies and the government (i.e. the rest of us), and some of the worst days, weeks, and months of their lives for the people who love you.

Granted, really serious things like that aren’t going to happen often in your life, but probably once, right? And when it does, if you haven’t been checking, you’re not going to catch it.

Living a healthy and simplified life, of course, can help keep you well too. And we’ll talk about that on this blog a lot, I’m sure. But getting over your medicophobias — and getting your ass into the doctor or dentist’s office from time to time — can also help.

Women, get your pap smears. Men, let them stick that little diddly up inside you to make sure you don’t have colon cancer. Don’t be embarrassed. We’ve all got colons and rectums and anuses and vaginas. (Well, you know what I mean.) And don’t be afraid, either. If it turns out you’re healthy, you’ll feel a million times better once you know that. If it turns out you’re, shall we say, less than healthy, you’ll feel a million times better once you start treating it than if you hadn’t. Either way, a preventative visit to the doctor is going to make your life better.

Isn’t it time you got those weird inexplicable thingie-majiggies looked at?

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If you don’t know about Web MD, you should. Check it for some great background resources on just about any medical condition you could imagine. And here’s their portal into healthy living for men, women, children, and seniors.

Plus, if you’re in need of a dentist in NYC, I’d be happy to recommend mine. Just shoot me an email at jeff [at] onelittlething [dot] org. He made those sweet molds of my teeth (above).

Light Up

Here’s the Thing:

Buy an energy-saver light bulb next time you’re at the drug store.

So you don’t need a light bulb. It’s okay, buy one anyway. Here’s why:

I’m switching out my old bulbs as they blow.

“If every American home replaced just one light bulb with an ENERGY STAR, we would save enough energy to light more than 2.5 million homes for a year and prevent greenhouse gases equivalent to the emissions of nearly 800,000 cars.”

800,000 cars! That’s directly off a U.S. government Web site (here). And you know the U.S. government wouldn’t lie to you, right? Or stretch the truth? But anyway, a ton of very reputable organizations are saying the same thing, so this time I’m buying.

A wonderful Web site for people who want to live greener lives, Treehugger.com, explains it like this: Energy saving light bulbs cost a little bit more than the regular ones but only use about a quarter of the energy and last many times longer — about 10,000 hours. It’s estimated that they pay for their higher price after about 500 hours of use, leaving about 9,500 hours of time for you to sit back and watch each bulb pay you back for your purchase — in longer life (for the bulb, not necessarily you, although the lower stress certainly won’t hurt) and lower bills.

The British non-profit Energy Saving Trust puts it this way: “An energy saving recommended light bulb will cost you around £3.50 compared to 50p for a regular bulb, but it will save you around £9 on your annual electricity bill and up to £100 over its lifetime!”

Sure, these babies cost you a little more up front (a lot more if you regularly drop them when trying to put them in, like I just did), but in the long run, they should save you money on your electric bill, and on light bulbs — no matter how many you drop and break.

Plus, less energy used = what? That’s right, less pollution, less climate change, and less dependence on foreign oil (therefore less wars, less drilling in pristine wilderness areas, and less overall craziness in the world – all just for changing a light bulb).

So next time you’re in the store and you happen upon the light bulb section, buy one of these. Then next time you need one, you’ll have one. Stick it in. Once you try ‘em, you’ll be hooked.

If you want to get really into this stuff, check out Treehugger’s great section on How to Green Your Lighting. They’ve even got a list of online sites where you can buy bulbs and other cool accessories right from your desk chair, and they’ve got similar guides showing how to green all aspects of your life.

And if you want to take the next step, check out this brilliant idea from Environmental Action: send a message to Wal-Mart asking them to give out a free energy saving light bulb to each of their 18 million customers nationwide. Imagine the energy savings! (Thanks to Amy Stodghill at It’s The Environment, Stupid for directing me to this one back in November!)

Hey — and don’t think that just cuz you’ve got better light bulbs you can leave them on all the time now. Remeber our “Get Turned Off” post earlier this week?

Bend Over

Here’s the Thing:

Pick up a piece of trash, even if it’s not yours.

My dad taught me something when I was about 10 or 12 that stuck with me, and he probably doesn’t even remember doing it. We got out of the car in the driveway one windy afternoon and he walked around in front of our house picking up all the bits of trash strewn about — a Dunkin Donuts cup, some dirty bits of newspaper, maybe a candy wrapper or something like that.

I must have walked right past trash in our yard thousands of times before that. I guess I just assumed it wasn’t my problem — that whatever was lying about in our yard would get blown on by the wind within a few minutes anyway.

That twenty second experience taught me something I’ve always remembered. There are some problems out there that affect us all, and if we all do a little bit to solve them when we get the chance, they won’t get out of hand. We don’t all have to pick up all the trash we see around town, but if we each pick up a little bit when we’ve got a few seconds to spare, then, after a while, there won’t be much of a trash problem at all.

I guess this one gets filed in the “we’re all in this together” category.

(Image (c) Jill Mueller)

It's Valentine's Day, Spread the Love

Here’s the Thing:

Buy Fair Trade chocolate & flowers for your sweetie.

Your honey-bunches-of-oats is going to cop a whole lot of gratitude when you pull out those Valentine’s Day proofs of your affection. You will have made his or her day.

Nothing says ‘I love you’ like goofy yellow tulips.

That’s awesome.

But with just a few clicks of your mouse, you can make hundreds of other people’s day at the same time!

You see there’s a lot of bad stuff that goes on in the chocolate and flower businesses around the world. With chocolate, the main issues are child labor and worker exploitation — primarily in West Africa. As for flowers, the issue is weak labor laws in Colombia, which is the main supplier of flowers to the United States. Flower workers there are exposed to dangerous chemicals without any protective gear and they’re forced to work long hours at repetitive tasks that often cause painful carpal tunnel injuries. (Alexandra Early’s excellent article turns over all the dirt on Colombia’s flower industry.)

So what’s the alternative? Buy fair trade chocolate and fair trade flowers. For the flowers, check out Organic Bouquet online — they’re one of the only sellers in the United States to be certified by “Veriflora” (technically “fair trade” is not the term used for flowers, but who’s counting?). That means their flowers have been produced in an environmentally and socially responsible manner.

For chocolate, you have lots more options, but I would recommend the Global Exchange store for buyers in the U.S. and Canada.

Ok, so I recognize this article is coming too late to actually be useful for you on Valentine’s Day. My bad. But, if you’re like me, and you tend to celebrate holidays about a week late anyway, this may be just what the doctor ordered. You can use the excuse that you needed the extra time to make sure you were doing the socially responsible thing. Or heck, just celebrate it twice!

Oh, and if you’re interested in buying lots of other fair trade stuff, check out this handy listing of online sites to buy coffe, tea, soap, stationary, knick-knacks, and more.