Embracing the Amie. . .

At the beginning of the year, I made a commitment to embrace the Amie.  To stop fighting who I am and be more accepting of myself.  How am I doing?  Well. . . I"m not.  It's fall, a new school year, and I'm thinking a lot lately that I'm not doing a very good job of it, which is making me a stressed out, unsatisfied, restless person.  I feel a little overwhelmed by the enormity of doing this, so I'm doing nothing, which is very stressfull to me.

So I have decided to embrace my mid-life crisis (my sustainability obsession), and just accept it.  I've already made a lot of changes, so I will continue to do those, and add small things until I feel I'm there.  So to start off my new attitude, I'm going to make a little list of the things I've already done.

• I made raised beds and planted a small garden
• Made a compost bin and started REALLY composting
• Made reusable lunch bags (to replace plastic zip-lock bags)
• Recycled men's shirts to make plaid quilts
• Made cloth napkins
• Turned the airconditioning up a few degrees (saving me substantially on my electric bill)
• Line dry laundry (sometimes--not really consistently)
• Make laundry detergent
• Make dishwasher soap
• Make salad dressing (more for taste than anything else)
• Make brownie mix
• Make makeup remover

I've also decided that I need to do ONE SMALL THING at a time, and when I get a handle on that, then I can do another small thing.  Hopefully this will keep me from feeling so overwhelmed with the work of it, since I really only have to work on one thing at a time. 

On that note, my one small thing for now is going to be making sure to use reusable bags, although I need to find a pattern and MAKE some fabric bags.  I'm not sure the reusable bags (that are plastic) from the store are much better than the cheapy plastic bags. 

And. . . because I'm an overachiever, I'm going to  be working on my next small thing too, which is going to be planting a fall garden.  More tomatoes, cucumbers, lettuce, and herbs.  Right now I'm doing research (mostly consisting of looking pretty gardens up on Pinterest--lol), so I really won't work on that for a week or two yet. 

Will check in again soon.