Daily Decisions - Personal care

Here's the next-up in the Daily Decisions series...

Goal:  Use fewer resources
The Choice: I stopped wearing deodorant on the days that I'm not interacting with people (besides my DH).  While I am a smelly enough person that I wouldn't want to make people smell me unnecessarily, I really don't need to mask myself from my own nose.  Plus, since I make my own deodorant, this helps me have to make more less often. :)

Daily Decisions - Purchasing power

One thing that I was thinking about today is how much my change in attitudes and understanding of the world has affected all my decisions including ones that most people probably don't think twice about.  I think that being conscientious of our role in our family, community and world is important, so I decided to start sharing my thought processes through a "Daily Decisions" series.  I'm not saying that all of the decisions I make end up being the best possible ones, but I do my best, and I'd love to just get people thinking (and sharing your ideas with me, if you find you have some to share!).  In sharing, I will explain which goals influence my decisions, what my options are, what choice I made, and any other factors that may be pertinent.

Here's my first one to start...

What's happening: I'm buying thread to sew the binding of my quilt
Goals: Buy locally to keep money in the community, Find a store in walking/biking distance to avoid oil use
Options:  Joann's Fabrics and Crafts (1.7 miles away), Sharon's Attic Quilt Shop (2.2 miles away)
The Choice: Sharon's since it is locally owned and operated
Considerations for next time:  What about organic cotton thread since cotton is where a lot of the nasty chemicals are used in the agriculture business?

Humanity: All Suck or Just Some Suck?

Recently, I questioned the viewpoint that man is "totally depraved".  Now that I have let you think about it for awhile, I figured I'd let you know what I think about it.  For those of you who like Bible verses to back things up, I apologize in advance.  I am certain that I can use verses to use to make either point.  (For example, the "all our good works are filthy rags" verse can be used to explain that humans are totally depraved, and the "humans were created in God's image" verse can be used to explain that it doesn't make sense for humans to be totally depraved.)  I'm sure that you can find places on the Internet that support either point of view, so I'm going to just talk about what I have thought about.

I guess we should first figure out what it even means to be totally depraved.  The word 'totally' seems fairly straight-forward, and my handy-dandy Internet dictionary tells me that 'depraved' means 'morally corrupt'.  So, if we are totally depraved, then we must be absolutely morally corrupt.  But what does that mean?  Does that mean that our morals are all completely wrong?  Or that each of us has some wrong morals?  Or that when making moral choices, we are never able to make a completely moral choice?

It really boils down to how we define things, doesn't it?

With that, I don't think that humans are all suck.  I think that as humans (Christians and non-Christians alike) strive for good, it is clear evidence of us being God's loved creation that is not completely bad.  And since all good things come from God, we can see how much God loves us by the good that results from our efforts.  However, I would say that probably everything we do gets tainted by the hurt in the world.  Whether it be pride or selfishness, I think that even our good deeds are rarely done without thoughts of the self instead of purely out of love.  I think this is where I can see humans pale in comparison to the perfect goodness that is God.

The reason that the doctrine of "total depravity" bothers me is that it seems like it turns into a very negative, self- and other-deprecating belief.  It's like the focus is turned from how beautiful and wonderful God is compared to us to having an excuse to say how horrible humans are.  This is subtly different, but it is different because one focuses on the good and the other focuses on the bad.

I think that it is important to take the doctrine of our imperfection in the more positive light for a few reasons.  First, focusing on the positive turns our attention to looking for and toward the good which is just way more helpful than focusing on the negative.  Second, I think that focusing on how awful humans are tends to promote hatred and stifle compassion.

So, there you have it.  Humanity: Just Some Suck.

The nerdy fruit fly trap

What do you get when you allow over forty pounds of pears ripen so that you are able to can them?  FRUIT FLIES!  I take fruit fly antics seriously.  You think they're cute and little, but I saw one gunning for my eyes today while I was devouring a pear.  I saw its wheels turning: "If she doesn't have eyes... She won't be able to see the pear to eat it."  Well thought out, Fly.

While they seemed to decrease over the last week as I worked fairly hard to keep food sources out of the picture, today they had a population explosion, so I decided to set up a fruit fly trap.  It's simple: A jar, some fly bait (a pear core, in my case), a piece of paper rolled into a cone, and a bit of masking tape to close up the gap that the cone kept leaving.  You can see a few flies in this picture, but there are really about 20 in there.  I let them go outside right after taking the picture.

What makes this trap nerdy?  The fact that the flies must enter through a vortex of nasty looking tensor calculations.  I have no clue what's going on there... It's engineering stuff.  However, the nerdiness factor is strong.

Blowing Your Mind... Bible Style

The current belief held by most churches today seems to be that humans are essentially evil or totally depraved.  One of the verses used to support this is Genesis 6:5.  Below are the surrounding passages.

The LORD saw how great the wickedness of the human race had become on the earth, and that every inclination of the thoughts of the human heart was only evil all the time. The LORD regretted that he had made human beings on the earth, and his heart was deeply troubled.  So the LORD said, “I will wipe from the face of the earth the human race I have created—and with them the animals, the birds and the creatures that move along the ground—for I regret that I have made them.” But Noah found favor in the eyes of the LORD.  Genesis 6:5-8

Now the earth was corrupt in God’s sight and was full of violence.  God saw how corrupt the earth had become, for all the people on earth had corrupted their ways.  So God said to Noah, “I am going to put an end to all people, for the earth is filled with violence because of them. I am surely going to destroy both them and the earth."  Genesis 6:11-13

Here, we have a story where God regrets creating humans, so he plans to just get rid of them.  However, Noah finds favor with God, so God tells Noah, "I am going to put an end to all people because they have all  become evil and awful and are making the world a truly horrible place.  Oh, but not you.  You're not part of all people."

How does this seeming contradiction affect our theology?  Also, what does it mean that the amount of wickedness done by humans changes?  Does that mean that we are sometimes more evil than others?  Does being more evil imply that at some point there was more good?

I might write a post in the future regarding my current personal stance on Humanity: All Suck or Just Some Suck?, but I figured that it'd be fun to give the few of you who read this a chance to think about it yourself first so that you can tell me where you think I'm wrong. ;)

Happy thinking!

WORMS!

I've been thinking about worms for a long time...

Most of Matthew and my waste these days comes from the leftovers from our produce; rinds, cores, and the like.  I know it seems like this is innocuous stuff to send to the landfill because it's totally biodegradable, but unfortunately it's not.  In short, the conditions in a landfill are not those such that food waste can biodegrade.  (For more information about this, you can read about it here and here.)  What's worse is that because the waste is in an anaerobic environment, it ends up producing a lot of methane which is a major greenhouse gas that is 21 times more potent than carbon dioxide.  (Which is another reason to consider eating less beef, since cows are amazing methane producers, but I digress...)

In Corvallis, we did our best to keep our food waste from going to the landfill by hauling most of each week's scraps to church on Sunday and handing them off to a family who owns goats and chickens who eat said scraps.  If you happen to live in Corvallis, you might be interested in their municipal compost heap.  They have "green carts" that you can put in all kinds of plant and food matter along with paper towels and certain paper plates/cups.  (You have to verify that the plates/cups that you use do not have a plastic coating on them which many of them do... You may think it's wax, but it's probably plastic.  Look for plates that say they are compostable, or contact the manufacturer and ask them what the coating is.  Or, better yet, just use reusable plates.)    We were unable to participate in this awesome program, though, because we lived in an apartment that didn't have a bin.  I considered asking our manager to get one, but I realized that based on what I found in the recycling bins, I didn't think that the people in our apartment would use the green cart properly.  I digress yet again...

Now that we are in Aloha, we know no farmers, have no green cart, but still eat fruits and veggies!  We also have a little outdoor storage closet... Enter the worm bin.

I found directions about how to set one up here and found fairly local worms here.  I bought my plastic tub at Goodwill for $2.99, and I used our drill to put holes in it for ventilation and draining.  As I was walking home with my container (seriously... who walks 1.7 miles hauling one of these things?  I do.), I remembered that worms don't like light, but I had just bought a clear plastic container.  I remedied this by using some random spray paint that we have.  (For the record, I hate spray paint.  It is full of nasties, as your lungs will attest as you spray it.  From here on out, I'm only buying canned paint and use a brush when we need to paint... preferably the low-VOC variety.)  I happened to have pink, so I painted on a worm.  Or a "W".  Or whatever your imagination says it is.  My wormies arrived in a little box in the mail today, and they were still wriggling, so they're alive.  I prepared their bedding, and I placed them in it, and then I tossed in the few scraps that I managed to save today.

Make worm poop, young pinkish wrigglers!  Then make more worms!  Then I will steal your lovely worm poop and throw it at plants!  It shall be MARVELOUS!

The Oregon Food Bank

Since moving to Aloha, I have found that I have a fair amount of free time and no friends nearby.  To combat both of these issues, one of my thoughts was that I could volunteer somewhere.  I searched on Craigslist for awhile with no great opportunities popping out at me, but this past Saturday I somehow ran across the possibility of volunteering at OFB.  The Beaverton warehouse is about three miles away, so I signed up for a couple of hours today, and I ended up packing a bunch of frozen carrots into family-sized (3 pounds) packages for distribution.  I met a few nice ladies, and we ended up working with a group of students from a high school.  It turned out that in about an hour and a half or so, we prepared about 5,000 pounds of food for distribution which is a lot of food.  I really enjoyed doing this, and when I got home, I signed up for a few more shifts in the coming weeks.

For those of you who don't know much about this organization, it is a private non-profit that does a lot of work to try to prevent Oregonians from going hungry.  OFB is centered in Portland, but, if I remember correctly, the central Portland warehouse works with/feeds into 20 other warehouses across the state, and each of these warehouses works with smaller agencies that actually do the food distribution or cook the food for people to eat (like soup kitchens).  Even better, OFB is genuinely interested in helping prevent hunger, so they run free classes that teach people how to make good food choices to stretch their food dollars farther, how to cook inexpensive and nutritious meals, and how to grow gardens to produce their own food.  A couple blocks from the warehouse that I was working in was a garden that OFB runs, and they use this garden to teach people, and they also use it to create produce (5,000 pounds this year so far as of a few weeks ago) for the food bank.  Additionally, OFB advocates at a legislative level to speak for the hungry and poor in our state.

I really like the idea of doing something to help people be able to feed their families.  I think Jesus had compassion for the hungry, and I want to share in His vision for a world where people are not in need.  It would be very cool if we could all reach out to the people around us who are in need and spread our resources that way, but that is clearly not working, and I think that from my research and experience so far at OFB, it is a great (and perhaps efficient) way to reach out to people in need.  I maybe handled 100-200 bags of carrots today, so I feel like I'm now involved in that many people's lives.

Apparently Oregon is the "second hungriest" state, following Mississippi, I believe, in the nation right now.  The people in our state have been hit very hard by our economy, and OFB is distributing record numbers of emergency food boxes.  From the OFB website, "As a result of growing levels of long-term unemployment, 260,000 people per month eat meals from emergency food boxes. Of those, 85,800 are children. For the first time ever, Oregon Food Bank distributed more than 1 million emergency food boxes in fiscal year 2010-11."  People are hungry!

If you are interested in working with OFB, visit their website.  If you want to find your regional center, you can find that here.  You can also dig around a bit to find local agencies to work with if you want to be a part of actually distributing the food to people.  Of course, OFB takes donations, too.  They accept food donations, and if you find your region's food center, you should be able to either find a list of drop-off sites on their website, or you will be able to find a number to call to ask for this information!  If you want to get more food for your dollar, I'd recommend donating money directly to OFB.  By using their connections and by buying bulk, they can get four pounds of food for a dollar, and that's just impressive.
I think that's all I can think of to say for now, but please let me know if you have any questions!