Birthday With A Little Green Added In

As some of you may have noticed by my editor's note on Tuesday's post, Tuesday was my birthday.

Tuesday night when we took the dogs to the park for their nightly visit I was astounded by the number of people and dogs that were there.

There were 16 dogs and even more people and there were birthday cards as well.

I can't begin to tell you how excited I was at the turn out for my birthday considering I didn't think anyone actually knew the exact date of my birthday.

Pat and Wally arrived a few minutes after we did and they brought homemade ice cream and cake.

The topic changed from my birthday to cake and ice cream as people were telling Pat thanks for letting them know there would be homemade cake and ice cream since it was my birthday.

Well I'm not the brightest bulb in the lamp but it soon became clear about why there was such a large turnout.


I thought the turnout was due to my sweet personality but soon realized it was due to some sweet ice cream and cake.

Thanks Pat for bribing everyone to show up and thanks to all of you for coming. It was a great time.



You know going "Green" may not be as bad as I originally thought:

Naked packaging, naked employees -- is Lush the ultimate green product?


Yesterday was naked day at 24 Lush cosmetics stores across the U.S. (except for, maybe, the Somerset Collection Lush store in Troy, Michigan, whose mall managers said no to the protest). Employees are being encouraged to show up to work in nothing but their aprons as a protest against unneccessary packaging. Does this make it the ultimate green product? Or is there something a little cheeky in its promotion?


To highlight its environmental cause, Lush stages "naked" days, where employees are asked to come to work wearing just a white apron that says "Ask me why I am naked." The first U.S. version of this was set for Wednesday, August 27.

The company has also staged naked days in Amsterdam, Canada and Berlin.

Lush, a luxury cosmetic company based in Britain, is known for its efforts to reduce packaging -- about half of its products are sold without plastic wrap and other containers. Shampoos and soaps come in bars instead. Lush says that packaging uses up 8% of the world's oil resources. But still, that leaves a giant selection of its products with some packaging attached.


The company tried a similar naked day in Canada in 2007 and in Berlin most recently and for one, the blog treehugger.com asked how environmental it was to hand out leaflets explaining the protest.

Leave it to the tree huggers to try to ruin a good thing. I mean how much oil could a little leaflet use up anyway?

As Noah would say, "Come to the shower two by two." Share the same shower, share the same soap, and reduce the packaging.

Oh yeah, the power of the green shower.