Sunday, March 21, 2010

Attempting to Skateboard

Whoohoo! Just got back from my first skateboarding attempt ever (went with a couple friends). Even though all I can do is scoot along for a few seconds at a time and turn a tiny bit, if feels great! I think taking a break every once in a while to do something new and exciting is really helpful to someone like me who has an endless work load; I actually feel more motivated to study for my Calculus test now than I have all day.

Life is so good right now! I've gone from being a hopeless pessimist to a total optimist in the past three years or so. That's a long story...suffice it to say that I've changed a lot and I plan on changing more, and it's the best feeling in the world!

Friday, March 12, 2010

Writing with my Left Hand

I've been learning to write with my left hand. I want to be ambidextrous! For those that don't intuitively understand why this would be so cool, here are a few advantages to being able to write with both hands:

-if you start to get a hand cramp in one hand, you can switch to the other one
-you never have to worry about the annoying spiral in spiral bound notebooks getting in the way
-it's probably good for your brain
-you can confuse semi-observant people by writing with a different hand every time you see them
-if you break one of your hands you already know how to use your spare

I dedicated a notebook to purely left-hand writing. Almost every day for the past two or three weeks, I've been writing down all the song lyrics I can think of. I've even gotten to the point where I can take notes in class with my left hand! It just takes a lot longer (I'm at about 1/4 the speed of my right hand). Maybe I'll post pictures of before and after sometime. Right now it looks almost exactly like my normal handwriting.

Wednesday, March 10, 2010

Home-Made Shampoo

Last Saturday I made a new batch of home-made shampoo. It's a cool recipe I found here. This time I tried it with 3 parts distilled water and 1 part castille soap (the jajoba oil is mixed in with the soap already).

I like this shampoo as much if not better than commercial shampoos. Plus it cheaper and you know what's in it. Another reason I've gotten interested in home-made products is that they're more environmental and getting closer to the local economy model (as opposed to relying on corporations for everything in life).

I know, I'm still buying the ingredients from the store, but I've taken the first step and eliminated the commercial shampoos. The next step would be making my own soap, then making my own olive oil for the soap. Ideally, I'd either grow my own olives (unlikely), or know the people that grow the olives/make the olive oil. The idea is to know as much as you can about what's being made and who's making it. I think that too often, people just switch to products with the word "green" stamped on it.

There's a lot more going on than the surface appearance. Let's face it, we, the average "consumers", don't know hardly anything about what resources are being used up. You can't fix the problem just by switching from using one type of resource to the point that it's gone to using an alternative resource to the point where it's gone. That's what corporations do; use things in bulk. Whatever is cheaper to make or comes with a bigger payoff. What's needed to be truly environmental is to know what resources are available locally. < /tangent >

Anyways, I replaced the shower head to a water saving one (finally). Our house is not as environmentally friendly as it could be, and I want to work on that. In my spare time, haha. I also found some recipes for home-made conditioner and laundry detergent that I want to try. I'll post about the results :)