DIY....toothpaste?

Hello folks! The vacation was lovely, but alas it's over and it's time to get back into the swing of things. I have a workshop that I'm running for work at the end of the month that I need to prepare for, so I thought I'd accomplish two things at once and share what I'm working on with you fine folks on teh interwebz.

The project is a lunch'n learn on eco-personal care that I'm offering to our staff through our HR department. I did an info session on the toxins in our personal care for the artists in residence earlier in the summer and it got a really good response. The environmental committee was impressed with all the research I had done and my borderline-obsessive knowledge of the effects of toxic chemicals, and asked if I would be interested in running DIY sessions if they helped pay for the supplies. Of course I was!

I've asked people to request what they'd like to learn to make in our sessions, and the first request I had was for toothpaste. Personally, I'm a store-bought eco-toothpaste kind of girl (Green Beaver Frosty Mint is currently in my bathroom), but I figured I'd give it a try. The following recipe is from Adria Vasil's book Ecoholic (pg. 20, in the Canadian edition), which I believe she got from www.pioneerthinking.com

DIY Eco-Toothpaste

6 teaspoons baking soda (whitener)
1/3 teaspoon salt (mild abrasive)
4 teaspoons vegetable glycerin (to create the gel)
15 drops of an organic essential oil - wintergreen, spearmint (minty fresh flavour) (I used peppermint instead)

Mix into a paste. Store in a small, labelled jar.

My slightly drippy homemade toothpaste

I....am not sure what I really think about this one. It is SUPER salty, and no amount of added mint essential oil is going to change that. However, baking soda does leave your teeth feeling very nice smooth. I found another recipe elsewhere that used coconut oil and xylitol in addition to the baking soda, which apparently helps off-set the saltiness. However, I forgot to look for xylitol at the health food store today, so that'll have to wait for another day.


I really don't know if toothpaste is one of those things you can successfully DIY. Sure, it's cheaper this way but I think I might rather wait for 10% off Tuesday at the health food store and stock up then. Has anyone else tried making their own before?

Gone Fishin'

...or something like that.

I'm off on vacation! Back to Ontario for me for two weeks for my BFF's wedding and some family festivities. It's starting to feel like fall (already!) in the Rockies, so the timing is ideal - Southern Ontario is still hot humid, and very much like summer. Also, I heard something about potential snow on Friday, so I'm skeedadling my little butt off to the airport as fast as possible! Time for some fun, sun, and yes, maybe even some fishing.

See you in a few weeks!

Summer

Feisty Foxes Bring Home the Hardware!

 Dragonboat festival was, in a word, awesome. Or, in three words: SO MUCH FUN!!!! (this is how I felt all weekend, complete with all five exclamation points :P)

 My upstart women’s team, the Feisty Foxes, did quite well coming in third place in the women’s division. Not too shabby for a bunch of ladies who (mostly) only set foot in a real dragon boat last week! We did have some veterans on our team, ladies such as myself who competed on corporate teams in years past, but “veteran” really means only an additional 4 hours of practice in this case.

What a great group of women, and such great community spirit. This was the first time my community had put together a community team for the festival – that is, a team that wasn’t a corporate thing. In this sort of town, it’s too easy for all of the special events to be for the tourists and leave the locals on the outside. To have a team made up of local women from all demographics – long-timers, seasonal workers, and even the mayor, certainly says something about our local community. Add in the fact that we had more committed women than we had seats on a boat, and that everyone worked together to ensure we all got a fair chance to paddle – well that certainly says something indeed.

I am so freaking proud of all these women who came together to made this team. I am even more proud of us for making this team work without any drama, whining, backstabbing, or stupidity and giving it our all in every race – even when we were doing back-to-back 500m races against mixed teams who could have easily kicked our collective asses. (btw, we actually did okay in those ones too- came  in fifth in C divison!) (Okay, fine, fifth out of six teams.) (IT WAS BACK TO BACK 500M FINALS!)

...

Whatever, we only cared about our women’s standings anyways.

Ahem. Sorry, where was I?

It’s Thursday now, so most of the sore muscles and frantic energy have worn off, but wow, what an experience. We brought home the hardware, had a great time, and can’t wait to do it all over again. All of the local teams (corporate and otherwise) are churning with ideas and by next year we should have our very own local dragon boat club. But the best part? All that training paid off, and I now have a wicked set of guns :P


Note: I wrote this post on Thursday with the intent of posting it when I got home and got some pictures. Unfortunately I'm having picture issues, so I'm posing it now and will add the pics later. Because I KNOW you all want digital tickets to the gun show :P

Hello!

Photo from North Shore Dragon Boat Festival

Just popping in quickly to let you know that I'm still here! I haven't given up on this blog yet, I promise :)

This past month has been non-stop busy with working both of my jobs (50 hours a week is FUN! :P), preparing for my best friend's wedding, creating and presenting my first Toxin-Free Body Care session for the the local community, and training for race weekend.

Yes, race weekend! I am part of the inaugural crew of our valley's first all-women's dragonboat team. We've been training since May on dry land and in large voyageur canoes all prepping for this weekend's Dragon Boat Festival! We're a casual social team with a competitive streak, and we're going up against some very experienced crews from out of province and out of country in our division. Needless to say, we've got a long way to go to have half a chance of keeping up with our competition, so we've been training hard. And it doesn't hurt that the very attractive professional coach and event orgainzer has come down from Edmonton to train us either :)

I'll be back after this weekend with some posts, 'til then, Paddles Up!

Not my team :P Photo from ottawacitizen.com

Happy Belated Canada Day!

Summer has been a busy little blogger this week, doing everything under the sun EXCEPT blogging, lol!

Summer (the season) has finally made an appearance in my neck of the woods, and it's here with a vengance! Bright blue skies 3 days in a row, hight 20-ies every day....after all the rain and cold(and snow!) in June, I'm feeling very spoiled. So, when I haven't been working at one of my 3 jobs, participating in flash mobs, training with my dragonboat team, or madly trying to get errands done in my spare time, I've been just crashing outside on the deck with a beer in hand. Ahhhhh....sunshine and beer. Good combination :)

So yes, it's been busy. I started a new position with my company this week which has been interesting and challenging, however I'm still doing some shifts in my old position to help cover until they can find a replacement. In addition to that I'm still working my part-time retail job, so I get the fabulous luck of two weeks straight without any days off! Yay! *Sigh* I know, I know,  I brought it on myself. Just...can I get to complain a little? just a little? Okay. A tiny bit. I'm done now.

I am happy being busy, it's no fun to sit at home and be bored. I just think I've overextended myself a bit of late. I actually ended up sleeping in until 10:30 yesterday. Ten thirty! Unheard of! Usually I'm up by 8am and raring to go. It's just that this summer weather is such a rarity, I can't help but wish I was outside hiking or canoing or something, rather than inside working. Granted, this does mean I get to wear pretty sundresses to work, so it's not such a bad trade-off.

I have a couple of things I want to blog about, most notably the bellydance flash mob that I was in this week, and a thing call "The Modesty Project." I originally read about it on Mrs. B's blog last week, and it's been niggling at my mind ever since. I hope to get those niggly thoughts out on blog-paper soon. For now though, I'm writing this during a quite moment at work, and should probably get back to it. Until next time!

Culturally Catholic

I found this intriguing blog post today while wandering over to Charmed I'm Sure.  Deborah Castellano is an excellent writer -  I found her moral compass article on Witchvox, which of course lead me to her blog, which leads me here. (As an aside, I've been trying to follow her blog for a while now but was being technologically challenged and just couldn't figure out how to do that from my phone. Blogger = not so phone friendly. Glad I finally managed to wander over on a real computer!).

Anyways, Debora wrote this great little piece on doing the Catholicism to Pagan thing, and trying to find peace and balance with your Catholic roots. She brought up this concept of being culturally Catholic, much like people are culturally Jewish though they may not actively practice the religion. It's an interesting concept, and one I had never considered before. I had a roommate in university who had a Jewish background one side of her family, but never practiced as far as I knew. I couldn't understand how she could classify herself as Jewish but not practice that religion, though I knew people did it all the time. A few years down the road, I can now see what she was saying. As Andrew B Watt, one of the commenters on the blog post said, "[It's] like belonging to a particular tribe. Which we do. It’s not necessarily the set of religious obligations we hold to throughout our lives, but it’s the set of rituals and ceremonies we were initiated in, and it’s hard to let go of that."
I had never considered the possibility of this applying to my own heritage - that I could be culturally Catholic and religiously ambiguous.

Unlike Deborah, I don't have nieces and nephews to godparent yet, but I can see this concept as helping me reconcile my faith choices with my Italian Catholic family. It's a way of saying "I respect and honour the values of our family's religion. I do not reject this common bond that is so important in your life. I respect your commitment and your efforts to bring me up to be a upstanding member of our (non-religious) community and society. I accept the values you have instilled in me and will bring them with me as I progress through life, and pass them on to future generations."

Catholicism was such an integral part of my life for the first 18-odd years, it has made me the person I am today. I had a pretty good relationship with the Church, we just differed on certain topics (e.g. birth control) and the priests I was exposed to just seemed out of touch with the world I lived in. My real turning point was when, in confession one day, I told the priest that I didn't agree with the Church on some things, like homosexuality, and he took it as "I'm a lesbian" and started talking vaguely about how we should resist the urges and pray for guidance...he totally missed the mark and wasn't listening to what I had to say. At which point, I stopped making regular efforts to go to church. One misunderstanding priest was obviously not the whole reason, but the trigger. But I'm getting off-topic. Such an important part of one's life cannot be dismissed away by conversion from one religion to another, or even by rejecting religion altogether.

Has anyone else heard of the idea of being culturally Catholic/Christian? How have you been able to integrate that into your identity? I'm intrigued by this idea, and would love to hear input from others.

Whooo boy! It's been a while, eh?

Things have been super busy around my neck of the woods. I think I had about 2 days off of work total for the entire month of May. I have a full-time job as well as a part-time one, and the hours really ramped up last month. I kept meaning to blog every time I saw a good post that I wanted to respond to...it was just a matter of finding the time. Clearly, I didn't. Not to worry though, June is looking a lot less hetic!

Lots of stuff going on around Casa de Summer. I (finally!) started my planter box garden experiments, something I've been meaning to do since the beginning of last summer. For the vast majority of the year, my apartment balcony gets zero sunlight (north facing windows for the win!), but with the sun riding high in the sky and the long days around Midsummer, we do actually get some sunlight from 3pm-7pm. I've been desperate to grow some plants, but didn't know how they'd survive with the lack of sun. They don't get much, but the herbs I've planted aren't dead yet! Actually, the chives are looking quite happy. I wish I could say the same for my shade-loving coleus... out of six, 2 shriveled with in the first week.They were supposed to be the sure bet! Freakin' coleus. I would show you pictures but it's snowing today (SNOWING) and it's just sad.

What else has been going on...I bought a bike (yay green transportation!), joined the local women's dragonboat team, wore shorts, it snowed, wore my winter jacket, cut off most of my hair on a whim (it's so short now!), learned how to install insulation, and got a new full-time job. Oh yes, and the town has been under flood advisories for the past few days. The river has overrun many of its banks and has turned low-lying fields into new ponds. I think I should have bought a canoe instead of a bike...I'd get more use out of it.

Midsummer is just a few weeks away, and I cannot WAIT. As a kid, I loved the long days of summer, but the days are a lot longer here in Alberta than Southern Ontario. It's bright at 4am, and doesn't get properly dark until 10:30 or 11pm. It's really messing with my sleep schedule, so I'm looking forward to the days getting a little shorter. Not a lot shorter, just a little. (Did I mention that in December the sun is barely up by the time I get to work at 8:30am and has already set by 5pm?) It's a matter of extremes out here.

I'm not sure what I'll do to celebrate this year. I really like the sound of a bonfire, but as the fire pits at the rec grounds are currently underwater, that might be a bit soggy still. Smaller risk of forest fire, I guess! I'm the only pagan-y person I know out here, so I might just do a non-pagan celebration with friends that night. Who doesn't love a party? What are your plans?

I plan to get at least 1 more post done in June (ha!), so I shall see you around soon!