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Sunday, August 31, 2014

Just one more day until...the JUST ONE THING CHALLENGE!

Did you notice I was yelling there in the title?  Yeah, I was.  I'm excited.

So are you ready for it?  Are you wondering why I'm freaking out and yelling?  

Well, you know, I like to get excited about things.
  

Duh.  So, let me give you a sneak preview - we're staring with something that is going to cost you ZERO dollars (or pounds, or lira, or euros, or cacahuetes).  And it is going to be something that is going to boost your immune system (yes!), save you money (aww yeah!), and make your food taste better (whuuuuuuuuuuut).

Are you ready for it?

Okay.  I have to say that when I said it to my sweet mother-in-law, she may have reacted as if I said, "For the next two weeks, you need to live without your arms."  But we are strong people, aren't we?  Aren't we determined?  Are you the kind of person who could do anything that would yield you positive results if you wanted to step up to the challenge for a mere two weeks?  We are not wimpy little wussbuckets, no, no.

We're starting our challenge - the first two weeks - in living without using...a microwave.

(I paused there in case you were screaming and falling out of your chair.  I'll wait.  Climb back up.  It's gonna be okay.  I'm not sure if you knew this, but humanity lived without microwaves for like maybe six thousand years.  I think we might make it for these next two weeks.)

What do you think?  Are you freaking out?  Well, don't. JULIE!  Don't freak out!  Mama Jo, we are going to get through this.

Tomorrow I'll tell you more about it.  

Peace, love, and get on my bus, baby!
Ms. Daisy




Monday, August 25, 2014

I repeat: do NOT get a dog. Part 8,000,000

Let's say you've got company coming over tomorrow night.  Let's say they've not been to your house before.  Let's say they live in Nicelandia and you live in Raton Rouge.

What, pray tell, will happen?  

a) your dog will poop all over the kitchen floor on Saturday morning (before anyone is awake)
b) your dog will poop all over the basement steps and they are carpeted  
c) your dog will poop up the walls and on your stove
d) your dog will poop 100% pure liquid
e) your dog will poop only on carpeted areas avoiding the 80% uncarpeted, 50's vintage tile in the basement (because that would be too easy to clean up)
f) your dog will poop a smell that no human has ever smelled which makes your husband run, screaming, far far away in the other direction, where he goes and gets a mask to even be in the house
or
g) yes, I am going to include it: all of the above
Guilty.


If you guessed "g", well, by golly, you're right!  Tell them what they've won, Johnny!  

Johnny: a newwww DOG!!

Feel free to come pick her up anytime.

Peace, love, and I've washed it 4 times and I can still smell it,
Ms. Daisy

Thursday, August 21, 2014

Join the Just One Thing challenge!

So, did you think about it?  Do you want to take on the get healthy, Just One Thing challenge?  Oh, you so do.  I know you do!  Let's rebel against this unhealthy, sick, crazy society and take steps toward being healthy, strong, and clear-headed.

As I said, we'll start up on September 1 - I'll post the deets that day.  You can be thinking about getting your game face on and starting fresh for the school year.  

I am here to encourage you toward healthy, manageable steps - one step at a time.  We're not swallowing the whole camel here, just taking one bite at a time.  This challenge is not some wild thing that will cost you loads of money or insane brain power, it is intended to make a lifestyle change for the better until each thing becomes your natural way of life.

So many people feel the gamut of what you could possibly do to become healthier is totally impossible because there are gajillions of things to do - that's why this is awesome.  You don't really have to think about it too much and you only have to do one thing at a time.



Join me!  Let's rock this!

If you want, you can send me an email to let me know you're on board.  It kinda helps with accountability and you can ask me questions.

The email for this challenge is: justonethingchallenge {at} gmail.com

Peace, love and camel soup,
Ms. Daisy

Wednesday, August 20, 2014

The Just One Thing Challenge

some things people often want to change...but don't...
Good morning, peeps!  I am super excited to share the (bum ba da baaaaaaaaaaa!) Just One Thing challenge with you.

And you're like, "Wow, yeah!  That's great!...um...what's the Just One Thing challenge?"

So here's what I'm thinking.  A lot of people want to be healthy, they really do.  But the problem lies in that there are sooooooo many things that you could do that it kind of gets down to being totally overwhelmed and when you hit that stage, you go in to the I Am Totally Giving Up mode.  You think about high fructose corn syrup, GMO's, partially hydrogenated oils, pop, microwave use, toxic tap water, household cleaners of death, toxic personal products, pesticides, and the list goes on and on - and as each thing is added to the top of the pile, you feel the sinking and drowning feeling that subdues you into passive exasperation, which makes you throw up your hands and say, "Forget it!  It's all going to kill me!  Why am I even going to try?!  I might as well enjoy my McDonald's burgers and forget about it!"  

No, my dears.  Do not give up.  I want you to live, dang it, LIVE!  An existence filled with prescription meds, unsatisfying quasi-food substances, a cloudy brain due to toxins, obesity, and cancer is not the optimal life.  It is the easier way, to be sure, but is that the life you're going to consider that you lived to the fullest when you get to the end of your story?  Don't you have a bucket list?
    
You can't do it all - all at once.  That makes people go nuts.  Change doesn't last. You've got to make change you can deal with, one step at a time.  That is how success happens.  (Unless you're my friend Nikki.  She cut everything cold turkey.  Side note: you have to take into consideration that Nikki won that Alpha award at Lifetime Fitness.  She's a little Type A and I appreciate that, cuz I am too, but most people find success down a slow, manageable path.)

That's what I'm here for today.  The Just One Thing challenge is just that.  Changing one little thing at a time, until it becomes an easy part of your routine.  I walked down this road and I can tell you, it works.  You can gain support knowing that other people are doing it, too.  You're not alone.  I'll help you through it.  I'll give you the why - which fuels the reasoning behind doing something to help it stick.  

So, what do you say?  Do you want to try it?  Want to jump on board?  Everybody's doin' it...  Spread the word.  Get your friends onboard, encourage them to be healthy, too.  Make a competition among yourselves to fuel your passion, which will optimize your success!  I won't ask you to do anything that I'm not doing, too.  

What do you think? Jump aboard, we're starting September 1.  More info to come.

Peace, love, and let's do just one thing,
Ms. Daisy

Tuesday, August 19, 2014

Don't be like so 1990! As if! Toxins that are like, so totally, like five minutes ago.

90's marketing. Still amazing 20 years later.
You remember 1990, right?  Yes, some of you were like 2 years old.  (That goes out to my seester and her peeps.)  But for the rest of us, we remember it like it was just yesterday.  We rocked the hair, the neon hypercolor t-shirts, pretended to know what Nirvana was saying, and belted out, "Noooothing compares, noTHING com-pares toyouuuuuu..." while wearing your Z Cavericci's.  Can I borrow your I.O.U. sweatshirt, BFF?  LYLAS!  You can use my slap bracelet.  Those were the days, eh?

Well, the world has changed quite a bit from those good ol' days.  No longer is it fashionable to wear clothing that shows off in gloriously wild different colors when you are sweating.  (No seriously, who THOUGHT of that?)

There are a few other bits that have tried to hold their grip in the realms of today, however, and they are naughty and don't belong here.

These belong to the dark side of 1990.  We are like so totally over them, as if.

However, although they may not be welcome, some of these may even be lurking in your home.  These are way worse than the pictures of your hair with two gallons of Aqua Net on it.

What, pray tell, may these be?

Let's start off with one that is a prevalent pestilence of today's world: the fad of anti-bacterialism, specifically in the form of anti-bacterial soap.

"Wha?!"  You say.  "A pestilence?  Surely you jest, dear Ms. Daisy!"

Oh, I wish, my darling, I wish.  But a pestilence I mean, nonetheless.  Maybe you're familiar with the active ingredient in anti-bac soaps - it's called triclosan.  If you've got a bottle in the house, check yours.  It is likely it's there.  Let me give you a heads up - this is NOT good - for you, your family, your friends, the earth, the animals...you're pretty much killing everyone and everything.  Great job.

Triclosan was marketed to be a murderous agent on the bad germs.  Right?  Isn't that what you thought?  (What else would I wash my hands with after touching uncoooked chicken?!)  When you go out and buy something that says "anti-bacterial", it is likely you're thinking, "Like oh my gosh! (Valley girl accent, please.)  I am so killing these yuckies!" 

Permit me my drama while I say that they are rather quite killing you.

Besides the whole gigantic thing about killing off your natural responders that are on your body to fight evil invaders in the first place (which is highly dangerous and comes with an entire host of issues), we've got a darker and even scarier side of it - new studies are showing that triclosan is something that mimics estrogen in the body.  This throws off your endocrine system (pituitary, ovaries, testes, thyroid, pancreas, hypothalamus gland, gastrointestinal tract, adrenals, pineal and parathyroid: a.k.a. stuff you don't want screwed up).  This leads to abnormal cell growths - ever heard of abnormal cell growth?  Maybe...um...tumors?

When this was studied at the Korea Research Institute of Bioscience and Biotechnology, they found that this looked like an increase in breast cancer.  Breast cancer cells looooooooooooove triclosan.  They are sorority girls and triclosan is a frat party.  They think they're at the beach when they hang out with this stuff.  They thrive on it.  Oh!  And good news for the breast cancer cells - triclosan bioaccumulates.  Yep.  It goes in and stays.  Not good news for humans, however.  

There is another compound called octylphenol (the lesser known antibac ingredient) that is best friends with triclosan.  They work together and octylphenol increases the amount of cancer cells while triclosan gets them going.  Not the chicken soap you were looking for, I'd imagine.

In this study, triclosan was found to be in the urine of 75% of all those studied.  (According to sciencedaily.com)  This is so not cool, dude, not cool.

Do some further reading here:
http://pubs.acs.org/doi/abs/10.1021/tx5000156

http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2014/04/140423102756.htm

Triclosan isn't just hiding in the antibacterial soap.  Nope, glory hallelujah, you can find it hanging out in your Colgate Total toothpaste.  What a relief.  I was wondering how I could directly put it into my mouth!  If you want to check out a longer (and more ridiculous) list of some products that contain triclosan, check it out here. 

What to do?  Personally, I avoid that stuff like the plague.  I use the soap that is made by Dr. Bronner.  There is a liquid variety if you are so inclined, and there is also the traditional bar types should that fancy strike you.  The liquid stuff is so concentrated that it may be diluted 50% with water.  I believe it is sold usually in one liter bottles (and it costs about $10 at Trader Joe's).  This means you can get about 2 liters of soap for ten bucks.  Yeah.  Cheaper and doesn't contain poison and cancer candy.  Double bonus.
Hang on, baby, I've almost made your dinner...

What else ought to be the passing fad, you ask?  Are you ready for this shocker?  Your microwave.  Think about it for two seconds.  You totally take for granted that you are heating up your food with RADIATION.  No glaring danger, eh?  Yes, it may be part of the social norm, but it doesn't mean 1) it ought to be and 2) that it is safe.  

Microwaving food heats up the food from the inside out - making those insides quake and shake with heat while other bits of it remain cold.  Have you ever experienced that?  You have to mix it up to warm it all?  You are already familiar with the warnings about heating up bottles in the microwave (hot spots, distorting the makeup of the milk on a cellular level) - you know, you may as well be punching your baby with a blowtorch?  

Dr. Hans Hertel explains it like this: "There is extensive scientific literature concerning the hazardous effects of direct microwave radiation of living systems...it is astonishing therefore to realize how little effort has been taken to replace this detrimental technique of microwave cooking with technology more in accordance with nature...of all the natural substances - which are polar - the oxygen of water molecules reacts most sensitively.  This is how microwave cooking heat is generated - friction from this violence in water molecules.  Structures of molecules are torn apart, molecules are forcefully deformed, called structural isomerism, and thus become impaired in quality.  This is contrary to conventional heating of food where heat transfers convectionally from without to within.  Cooking by microwaves begins within the cells and molecules where water is present and where the energy is transformed into frictional heat."  (quoted in Search for Health)  


Basically, you are living through a social experiment.  The microwave is the question, and you are the guinea pigger.  How does that wheel feel, Pikachu?  

What do you do?  How often and for what do you use your microwave?  Are you a person who just uses it to heat your coffee/tea for the fifteenth time (since you didn't get a chance to sit down and drink it all yet)?  Or do you defrost your meat in it?  Or do you cook your child's breakfast in it?  Or do you sleep in it?  Er, wait.  Maybe (hopefully) not that one.

I have a challenge for you.  Try just for this week to not use your microwave.  Put a big old sticky note on it to remind you.  Cold coffee?  Heat it up in a pot on the stove.  It takes about the same amount of time.  Need to defrost meat?  Plan ahead, sista!  Get that stuff out of the freezer the night before.  I think you'll find you appreciate the taste of things that are not cooked in a radiation box.

(Call me a foodie, I know!)

These two big pieces of our culture came into the norm in these United States and we adopted them without much thought.  We're smarter now and I'm encouraging you to think about what you're putting in and on your body.  Be aware, and do your due diligence.  

Would you give it a try?  Would you switch to a non-anti-bac soap?  Would you try to cast off the microwave for a week and see how it goes?  Maybe you'll find your new (yet extra vintage) ways are like so totally gnarly dude, that you won't like want to ever go like back.

Peace, love, and be radical,
Ms. Daisy

Monday, August 18, 2014

An Incredible Display of Incompetence: Trugreen = True Buffoonery

The scene: a spelling bee world championship.  
The players: three homeschooler finalists and a panel of judges.

Judge #1:  Please spell incompetence. 
The very definition of incompetence.

Homeschooler #1: Might you use it in a sentence, please?
Judge #1: The company Trugreen lawncare shows nothing but extreme and wild incompetence in all of its transactions.
Homeschooler #1:  Could you please tell me the definition?
Judge #2:  Let me explain it to you, sonny - it's a little story and it goes something like this...

One day a salesman came to my house.  He was a Trugreen salesman.  Now we already had a lawncare service - an all organic service that used nitrogen on our lawn and made it nice and healthy and not made of World War II bomb products.  But Mr. Trugreen Salesman promised us that they too had a wonderful nitrogen organic treatment that they would be happy to apply to our lawn - for the fraction of the price!

Well, alrighty.  I suppose we could give it a try.  We're always looking for ways to save money when we can, right?

Mr. Trugreen Sprayer Man comes, yes, he has a snaggle tooth and a molester mustache and looks at women like they are grass-fed T-bone steaks, and yes, besides spraying toxic chemicals all day long, he also chain smokes.  Well, this should prove to be interesting, no?

Spray #1 happens.  Nitrogen applied.  Hooray.

Spray #2 happens.  I talk to Snaggle Tooth and he says he "added a little extra for me", some grub control.  I wonder if my hubby ordered that, and go promptly inside to discuss my horror at such a thing as it is 100% pure toxins.  Hubby says he did not order it.  How did we get it then?

Call the company.  They don't know.  

Spray #3 happens.  Snaggle tooth has sprayed toxic chemicals.  You know, the kind that I would boycott with signs on the side of the road in a protest?  I call the company, concerned, perplexed, and freaking out.  They have no idea how this happened.

We are now totally fed up.  The grass is dead.  We have chemicals on our lawn.  MY lawn.  You know, the organic, hippie, compost bin, permaculture gardener, non-toxic to the all the way max lawn people?  And crazysauce sprayed WWII bombs on it.  My blood begins to boil.

I call with flamboyant words to share that express the very depths of my raw emotion, and although it is not the fault of the woman on the phone (I repeat to her a few times) I am beyond irate and consider making up new swear* words just for the occasion.

Hubby calls and tells them we have to break up with them and we'd like a refund for killing our grass, spraying it with death chemicals and not giving us the service that we were promised.  They agree.

They mail a check for the wrong amount.  A much smaller amount than it ought to have been.

We call again to straighten it out.  We ask to speak to the manager five times.  Manager never calls back (still hasn't).

We cancel the account and try to put it behind us.

Until today.

Oh no.  Please no.  What is this?  I drive up to my house.  There is one of those little plastic signs in the corner of my grass.  Oh sweet sandwiches and cheese, for all that is good and decent, please tell me that is NOT a "I just sprayed your lawn with a carcinogenic, mutagenic, toxic chemical of death again" sign.

It is.

Phone call.  Hi customer service person, I am calling because I have a tiny little (uber-sarcastic tone) problem.  I have cancelled my service with your company because they are total nincompoop buffoons who keep spraying toxic chemicals when I ordered organic nitrogen and for some reason YOUR SNAGGLETOOTH MOLESTER came back and sprayed my lawn today.  I am going to lose my entire mind right now.

Customer Service Rep: Um, I am not sure how this happened.  Your account is closed.

Me: How on earth is it possible that Mo Lester sprayed my lawn again today?  Is this for real?  Not only did you NOT give me what I wanted, but you gave me something I would never ever ever ever ever ever ever ever ever want in one zillion million billion trillion years.  THREE TIMES.

Customer Service Rep:  I don't know.

Me: For the love of all that is good and decent, please send a personal message to Mo Lester that if he comes back to my property, I am going to go ape.  Have you processed our refund?

Customer Service Rep: Um...it looks like they submitted a request.

Me: Thanks.

Homeschooler #1: I-n-c-o-m-p-e-t-e-n-c-e.  Incompetence.

Judge #1:  Ladies and gentlemen, we have a winner.

Peace, love and for your homework, please discuss at what point it is ethical to put landmines in your front lawn,
Ms. Daisy

*p.s. When I say swear words, I do mean words like "stinky blinky waggle baggle moo muffin!"  Just in case you thought I was a sailor.



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