Saturday, August 15, 2009

Saturday night

Tamale Pie is in the oven. Obviously I didn't have it for dinner. Was hungry after the gym, so I drove up to Lime Mexican Grill and had a burrito. Ate everything but one tortilla chip. Then did my grocery shopping at the Publix there. Was craving ginger snaps so I bought a bag of those and had eaten half of it by the time I got home. I'm stuffed. (Plus I'd had a protein drink when I stopped by home after the gym.) Had some coffee over at Starbucks after unloading the groceries. I'll do the laundry tomorrow.

Watching "Rate My Space" (atomic retro kitchen). The appliances remind me of the ones we had when I was a kid. (They were very old then. I was very young.)

I recently read this Salon article ("What's really in your shampoo"). The gist of the article was that, aside from a couple of detergents contained in shampoo that actually clean the hair, there are a lot of ingredients added to enhance the shampooing experience that may be harming the environment.

Shampoo, for example, contributes to high levels of estrogen and estrogen-like substances (endocrine disrupters) in freshwater downstream of sewage treatment plants that damage fish populations and cause male fish to grow ovaries, a sort of liquid feminism. My hometown of Calgary, Canada, studied the fish downstream of where we add our treated sewage to the river and discovered that female fish outnumber male fish 9 to 1. Estrogen runs through it. One study identifies more than 200 chemicals that are still present in wastewater after treatment. But the problem is likely much larger: environmental damage is difficult to estimate because we're dumping chemicals into the environment that have never been studied.

The writer, a Canadian, now uses Sunlight dish detergent to wash his hair. I bought some today. I'll let you know how it works.

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