If you’re one of those happy souls who regularly puts in the much-recommended but often elusive eight hours of sleep nightly, you’re essentially spending about a third of your life in dreamland. Which should be a strong incentive to invest in bedding that’s actually good for you – rather than synthetic stuff that can increase your exposure to health-hazardous toxins while you snooze.

...continued: Good in bed

When runner/hiker/caver Ben, aka Bad Ben, isn’t maintaining his beer-brewing blog, he posts about his adventures in trail running over at Bad Ben’s Ramblings. But sometimes he shares stuff to just make us think, like one recent post showing off some spoof ads from those culturejammers at Adbusters. Our fave spoof of the lot:

The greener side introduces us to Ron See and his remarkable invention.  “My whole family and I have been living off-grid since 1997,” he says.  “We use solar panels and a battery bank for most of our power supply, propane cook stove and hot water and a diesel generator for back up. I also have 2 windmills for battery charging that we are working towards installing. I run a small metal recycling and hauling business in Hartstown, PA. I have personally cleaned up over 2000 tons of scrap steel, and other metals from farm dumps old fence rows and businesses in the past 13 years.” Inspired by a contest in a Pennsylvania resort town that dared people to make and race flotation devices from old bottles, See decided to craft, patent, and sell his own raft.

Miguel of The Greener Side loves this contraption.  “You don’t need to purse your lips or buy a pump to blow it up. Instead, insert a bunch of 2-liter bottles to keep the $50 raft afloat.” See claims it is more durable than regular rafts.  He even says it’s “puppy-proof.”

Tales from the Crib is a group mommy blog with a difference. It describes itself as “18 different women, 33 crazy children. 1 baby in utero…Adventures, Advice and Questions from a group of Mormon women who met in Queens, NY and have now scattered all over the place.” And with that description, you’d expect high religion and maybe low drama.

Not so. What you get instead is a healthy dose of practicality and good humor in a group of woman with distinct interests and plenty of smart things to say. Take Brandolyn, for instance. She’s billed as the “earth mother” of the group, but she’s a very down-to-earth-earth-mother … including her recommendations of Fuzzibunz. “These diapers are really awesome,” she says.  “They have a fleece lining that keeps the baby dry and doesn’t stain, an inner removable core that is super absorbent — Anwen didn’t leak all night after 9 or 10 hours — and a waterproof outer layer that doesn’t leak. They also have adjustable snaps so they can grow with the baby. They are a breeze to clean—just toss them in the washer and dryer, no soaking or scrubbing. Plus Anwen gets a lot of diaper rashes and because these are breathable, soft cloth and keep her skin dry, she doesn’t get rashes. Also there are no chemicals and weird absorbent crystal things right next to her sensitive areas.” Good deal .. and a very informative site.

It’s been a long day – a long week – and I’m hungry.  But I don’t want brown rice and underprepared tofu – not again. 

We all know there’s no truth to the old hack that health food = tasteless food.  And my extended community here at ThisNext is where I turn to find the most tempting and delectable organic foods around, even when I’m snarfing for comfort foods – the ones I want in my kitchen right now, before I keel over from malnutrition.

And the winners (and their recommenders) are …

...continued: Five Organic Comfort Foods I Want Right Now

 “I would like to see a world where permaculture, green building, energy-efficiency, gardening, eco-groovy crafting, art, thrifting, environmental sustainability, and social justice are normal, everyday stuff,” says mimulus of Greenjewls.  “I want a world where healthy children can grow up to inherit a healthy planet.” And sustainability often means finding the perfect piece of equipment, investing in it, and even celebrating it…like the Aeternum Ellipse Pressure Cooker. 

“In the beginning I used it rarely,” she says, “scared off by mom’ s horror stories of exploding bean pots and terrified of the hiss. But the last few years it has become one of my favorite kitchen tools.  With the ohsawa pot and pressure cooker you can have great brown rice in 20 minutes…a few more minutes for steam fluffing, and presoaked beans take 10-15 minutes. Cooking with these tools vastly reduces the amount of natural gas/and or electricity needed to cook food. Pressure cooking helps to tenderize cheap cuts of meat and cuts down on the amount of time in the kitchen.”   As good as all this is, Greenjewls wishes there was an even cheaper way to go, but “unfortunately I have never seen a good pressure cooker at the thrift. This is definitely one tool that is worth the splurge.”

Ladielizzie of Green Is The New Black, a green blogger in the UK’s West Midlands, has great things to say about an unusual new book, Leo Hickman’s A Life Stripped Bare.   Leo, a journalist for The Guardian, was challenged to live a “more ethical lifestyle,” and even had three “ethical auditors” to examine every aspect of his (and his family’s) life.  It was a world-changing experience, and one that he chronicles with wit and insight, all the way from cleaning his bathroom with lemon juice and bicarb to receiving ecoballs in the mail, getting worms, and following his garbage all the way down the Thames just to see where it ends up.  “It’s all highly entertaining and enlightening,” Ladielizzie tells us.  Well worth the read…

Melissa of Alotta Errata is trying hard to live a good, green life, including pondering the packaging on organic foods that makes it just as tough to recycle as any processed food. She’s also discovered something simple, smart, and delicious: Hodgson Mills European Cheese and Herb Bread Mix as the key to the world’s greatest breadsticks. “I use the bread maker on the dough cycle, and then simply make breadsticks from the dough and bake them at 350 for about 12 minutes. The whole box yields nearly 20 breadsticks so you can imagine the joy and temptation of a kitchen filled with breadsticks. What we don’t eat I freeze in packets of 4, though a request was put in that the packets have more than four, because really 2 breadsticks per person is just not enough. Really. what was I thinking?

Leading a simpler, more centered, and more sustainable life doesn’t mean the things you buy, use, and make become blunt or plain. Quite the contrary: they become handmade, and that alone makes them special. Doilies, for instance, may seem terribly old-fashioned and even a little quaint, but they are in fact a unique marriage of the utilitarian and the beautiful…like The Venerable Shrone’s examples in her Home Burrough. She actually makes these by hand – this particular one from a pattern supplied by Delectable Doilies. These are more than handicrafts; these are works of art.

You find good blogs in the oddest places…like Justin Rowlatt’s Ethical Man, buried in the web site of the BBC.  In this ongoing “mission to lead a more ethical life,” Justin experiments with Eco Balls, a non-detergent clothes cleaning alternative  that “claims to allow clothes to be washed without the use of detergent…The balls look like fat little flying saucers and, as befits their eco status, they are green.”  The blurb on the side of the box claims that they “unleash ionic cleaning power to penetrate deep into clothing fibres to lift away dirt without fading bright colours.” But do they work?  Justin and his wife Bee (who, he confesses, does most of the washing) says they do about as well as their regular cleaning product, “but I haven’t tried to do whites yet.”