Friday, October 19, 2012

Faka'uha Rain Bath in Tongan from Water Logged and Carbonated



Friday, October 19, 2012
                                   
Paper Waste

This morning I realized that I was foolish in my way of preserving paper.  I wanted to use both sides with my UCLA class, for which I have a binder.  But I made the mistake of printing the instructor’s directions on the back of another student’s essay, and one of them got lost and, ultimately, couldn’t be put in the right section of my binder.

Why, you may ask, do I have to print anything out when I’m taking an online class?  It’s because I love reading in my recliner.  Maybe one thing I can do before the end of this class is get my iPad to work again so I can take it all into the living room.  But I’m also a hypographiac, which means I have to write, physically, in the margins and highlight things by hand.

Water

Once again I can brag that I haven’t bathed today and don’t plan to!  So there!  (Be sure to see this link if you haven’t already.)

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/10/31/fashion/31Unwashed.html?pagewanted=all&_r=0
or
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2010/10/30/do-we-need-to-bathe-daily_n_776435.html
 or
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/health/article-1380504/Seven-daily-sins-Shower-day-Rinse-brushing-teeth-These-healthy-habits-devilishly-bad-you.html

 (I can see that you may need to copy and paste rather than just clicking on them.)
 

I thought of another way that Tongans are water-wise, or at least used to be.  When it rained, they’d run outside to wash their hair.  There was actually a word for doing that, faka’uha.  I wish I’d remembered the word, but I had to look it up, and when I did I found a blog, “Water, water everywhere, and not a drop to wash my hair.” 


This blog is called “Ta’ahini ‘I Tonga” Girl in Tonga, and it sounds as if she’s an Australian volunteer.  I kept 28 diaries (composition books) when I was in Tonga, long before the Internet existed. 

But, hey, she’s writing about water, and that’s really my focus—that and being my meque’s eco-evangelist, and I did NOT help him find the Eco-god last weekend, when we went shewing carbon from Parkside to the Richmond District to the Lower Height, and back again looking for a vegetarian restaurant that was “strictly vegetarian.”  

And since I forgot to share Thursday's blog, here it is:

Thursday, October 18, 2012

Energy

I didn't  take the elevator when I went up to the fifth floor on campus today, and I didn't take it down.  In fact, I haven’t taken an elevator since this log began.  I hope I haven’t taken an escalator, but they go up and down regardless of whether anyone is on the steps.  Is that wasteful?  I’ve got to look into that.


Okay, a company called Schindler offers two types of elevators for department stores, based on the human traffic:  ecoline completence and ecoline premium.  For their energy reports they have this URL:


Here’s something from Slate:


They point out that escalators are better than elevators when they’re taking many more people than could fit in the elevator.  But we need to read on, and I haven’t finished my other assignments yet.

I noticed that among the weight-bearing exercises recommended is climbing stairs.  I also know that my meque, the one whose eco-evangelist I’m supposed to be, avoids taking steps, and he’s almost a decade older than I am.  Sometimes, when we go to the Century Plaza Theatre in Daly City, he pushes me up the stairs.  I appreciate that!

1 comment:

  1. Love the stories about the Tongans and water use as well as skipping the bathing.
    Stairs are good for you. My main way of getting exercise

    ReplyDelete

I don't think this is the kind of community-provided bench the SF Chronicle was talking about today in its article https://www.sfchronic...