This year our holiday gift is lip balm made from organic oils and butters – no paraffins, preservatives, or chemicals. We mixed in our favorite essential oils, heated it up, and poured them in containers.
Instead of the chapstick-style containers that we’ve used in the past, we are using glass containers with metal lids. With a little research, we got all ingredients and materials online – and the cost was the same as using plastic!
Love making gifts for friends and family for the holidays.
This year our holiday gift is lip balm made from organic oils and butters – no paraffins, preservatives, or chemicals. We mixed in our favorite essential oils, heated it up, and poured them in containers.
Instead of the chapstick-style containers that we’ve used in the past, we are using glass containers with metal lids. With a little research, we got all ingredients and materials online – and the cost was the same as using plastic!
Love making gifts for friends and family for the holidays.
One way to “divest” in natural gas (AKA METHANE) is to buy and install all-electric appliances. Yup! Don’t buy gas-powered appliances this holiday – and replace your gas stoves, heaters, dryers, etc. with electric ones when yours breaks down.
Starting in January 2020, all-electric appliances will be “encouraged” for all new buildings in areas in California. The California Energy Commission is working with 6 local governments to limit the use of natural gas for new construction. Berkeley has already passed a ban on gas appliances last summer, and Marin County has had a gas ban since April 2018. Yahoo!
Now San Jose, Menlo Park, San Mateo, West Hollywood, Santa Monica, and Marin County will ban or limit gas appliances in new buildings. While there are a few exceptions, I’m thrilled to see that California is leading the nation in the natural gas ban. There will be a backlash from the gas companies to protect their financial interests in continuing to FRACK across the nation to provide natural gas (methane). Remember natural gas (methane) is 20 times more potent than CO2 and is a major contributor towards global warming.
We can do this! Buy electric!
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In today’s podcast, I talk about why and how I changed my gift-giving habits. This year, instead of feeling the pressure to buy buy buy, let’s slow down and think about what’s really important – relationships and making memories.
Giving gifts can often feel like you’re reducing your relationship with someone from something personal to something transactional, where the purchase price of the gift reflects that person’s value to you (and vice versa). So why not give handmade gifts or share a conversation or a meal with friends and loved ones? These are things that come from a more personal place that reflects more of who you are, and can make more of a connection with others than a store-bought gift. And isn’t that what the holidays are REALLY about?
To listen to today’s podcast, find GakkoMom on iTunes and subscribe to it, or listen below:
Worried about losing your homeowner’s insurance due to your fire risk? Finally, some good news. The California Insurance Dept just prohibited insurance companies from not renewing policies for homeowners living in ZIP codes in or next to wildfires from one year from the date the area was declared a disaster for fires in 2018 and 2 years for fires in 2019 and later.
Cal Fire draws each fire’s perimeter and the insurance commissioner identifies which ZIP codes are covered. Check to see which zip codes have been protected by this new law after recent fires: http://www.insurance.ca.gov/0250-insurers/0300-insurers/0200-bulletins/bulletin-notices-commiss-opinion/upload/MandatoryMoratoriumOnNonRenewalsAfterRecentWildfireActivity.pdf
If you have been improperly denied renewal by your insurer, file a complaint at www.insurance.ca.gov or call 800.927.4357.
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Good news, freshmen! UC Merced has extended their applications until Dec 20th.
Transfer students, UC Merced, UC Riverside, and UC Santa Cruz have extended their transfer applications to Jan 3, 2020.
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In today’s podcast, I talk about how I’m changing my gift-giving habits this year so I can stand behind what I believe and promote a healthy future! To that end, I’m giving water filters this year! There are a lot of reasons for this (which are covered in the podcast), but I feel good that my loved ones will be receiving gifts that will help keep them healthy when I’m not around. I picked water filters because the majority of drinkable water in the United States barely qualifies as “drinkable”, because our water sources are poisoned by industrial chemicals, byproducts from fracking, pesticide run-off, and more.
To listen to today’s podcast, find GakkoMom on iTunes and subscribe to it, or listen below:
Did you know that we cut 25 MILLION Christmas trees every year in the US? They cover a million acres and they take 6-15 years to grow. What would Christmas be without having fresh Christmas trees in our homes? Artificial trees just don’t have the pine scent that wafts throughout the house. I struggled with this dilemma about 25 years ago and found a solution that would eliminate cutting trees and yet still provide the pine scent in our homes. We could build an Eco Xmas Tree!
By creating a “trunk” out of 2” by 4s,” and drilling holes up and down the trunk, we could build a Xmas tree using cut pine branches. Yup! I built the first Eco Xmas tree in 1994. We cut branches off our pine trees on the property and put them in the holes in the wooden “trunk.” Our Eco Xmas tree was perfect because there were no bald spots – we could easily replace the skimpy branches with fuller ones if needed.
Our Eco Xmas tree smelled just like a real Christmas tree and it looked even better. We decorated it just like we did real cut trees and everyone had to peek at the “trunk” because they didn’t believe it wasn’t a real tree. Best part, it was easy to disassemble. Instead of having to deal with a huge dead tree after Christmas, we simply pulled out the branches and burned them in the fireplace or composted them.
So this season, build your Eco Xmas Tree instead of cutting a fresh tree. With all of the fires we’ve had this year, we really need those 25 million trees to keep producing oxygen and sucking carbon dioxide out of the atmosphere!
Seems the media focuses on the hysteria that pipes out of the White House every day, and as a result, we’re not getting comprehensive coverage of what’s really going on in America. I was thrilled to learn that youth crimes have dropped all across the United States for 13 years. Now that’s good news!
Nationwide, property crime rate dropped about 7% and violent crime about 4% last year. In California, the youth arrest rate has dropped 86% since 1988. In San Francisco, arrests fell from 139 to just 16 last year, and they saw just 46 murders compared to 100 in 2007.
This historic drop in youth crimes and arrests comes 20 years after the fear of the “superpredator” teens that worried authorities. According to Mike Males, a senior research fellow at the Center on Juvenile and Criminal Justice in San Francisco, “It’s not just historic lows, it’s a historic chasm. It’s not even leveling out.”
This trend of declining crimes among youth is now decreasing cases for young adults between the ages of 18 and 24 as the youth get older. Experts and criminologists have many ideas but no concrete explanations for the decline in youth crime. I’m just glad that across the US, youth crime and arrests continue to drop to historic lows.
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My local bookstore Bookshop Santa Cruz now carries my book The Eco Xmas Tree. If you’re in the area, stop by and check out the Local Authors’ Section!
Love to support brick and mortar bookstores, and hope you do too! You can buy the book directly from Bookshop Santa Cruz by going here:
With the uncertainty, fear, and anxiety that we all face today, I hope we can gather with friends and family over Thanksgiving to appreciate the many things we are grateful for.
Turn off the news and close social media apps. Enjoy talking to people – face to face – and listening to their stories. This is REAL and this is what we need a little bit more of in our lives.
Wishing you a wonderful Thanksgiving!