In Which I Am Green... Sort Of

Despite all the talk these days about "going green", there are just some things that I refuse to cut back on or change. I realize that this impacts my carbon footprint in a negative way, but the way I see it, my quality of life sometimes takes precedence. I'll continue to recycle as much as I can and make sure I'm not being flat-out wasteful, and if that isn't enough, well, excuse me for a moment while I go plant a few trees.

One of the things I refuse to budge on is my use of paper products, like tissues. I'm sorry, but when I've got a cold and a metric ton of snot ready to be dispensed out of my nose, I'm going to want more than just one tissue to make sure the resulting deluge of sticky sinus juice doesn't blast right through those two plies and wind up on my hands. There's not much I hate more than that.

Same goes with toilet paper. I know that it's my shit I'm wiping, but that doesn't mean I want any of it on my hands. When I'm tasked with the chore of cleaning up after laying some cable, I'm going to wrap my hand with enough TP to put any Halloween Egyptian mummy to shame.

Really the only other thing I'm picky about is regular light bulbs versus compact fluorescents. When I turn a light on in my apartment, I want the light to come on at full strength. As anyone who uses compact fluorescents knows, they are dim for a little while and gradually become brighter....

... and that drives me crazy.

In just about every light fixture in my home, I use low-wattage incandescent bulbs, just like good ol' Thomas Edison intended. I am aware of the fact that even low-watt bulbs use more energy than CFLs do, but I'm okay with that. I'll gladly pay a little more to the power company each month if it means I'm not stumbling around my apartment in a weird semi-darkness until the bulbs finally warms up. (Before anyone gets on my back about energy conservation, I'm known as the Light Nazi in my house. I'm always shutting off extra lights or lights that were left on in other rooms.)

Maybe it's guilt, maybe it's laziness-turned-green thinking, but I do make up for these aforementioned shortcomings. Like not flushing the toilet every single time I take a leak. This drives The Boss crazy, but still I do it. No sense in wasting 1.6 gallons of perfectly good water each time I empty my bladder. Also, I wait to empty the trash until it is overflowing onto the floor and we are forced to start putting our trash on the edge of the counter. No sense in putting extra plastic trash bags in our landfills, right?

Conservation, people.

What things do you not like to cut back on?