On Earth Day

I've only just realised today was Earth Day and it's been happening on 22 April every year of my life. Obviously it's more a US thing than here, but I'm a bit disappointed that I never noticed before.

Cleaning materials still proving tricky: because the church doesn't have a credit card we'd need to set up an account with Natural Collection but they've not responded to e-mails on this. The administrator is too busy to be chasing these things up all the time. It turns out that our usual supplier has just added 'green' toilet cleaner and bathroom cleaner to their stock list. They're not a brand I recognise and I'm anxious that when we see the ingredients on the pack it'll turn out to be an excuse to charge us twice as much for something not much more green. But we're going to try them out, if only to encourage the suppliers that more of this is needed. Our cleaner is happy with Ecover in the bathrooms and the Co-op's multi-surface cleaner for the floor but we have yet to settle on a toilet cleaner that works well enough and this company's bathroom cleaner is apparently anti-bacterial so we're hoping it'll do for the kitchen to satisfy those health and safety folks.

Furniture: after much debating over new furniture for the refectory it seems that we're going to hang onto the old elm tables that came from Woolworths many eons ago and try to sand them down and polish them up, so very good news on the eco front there. However, even I have to admit that the chairs are really not comfy for long spells (of which there may be more once we get the film projector up and running in there) so we're still looking to replace these.

Feeding the birds: I finally got round to hanging up a couple of bird feeders in trees at the front of the church. The hope is that they're good for the wildlife and are a witness of our green intent too. The anxiety is that they won't stay there very long. I've not had chance to spend long enough out the front to be sure about the bird boxes but I don't think they have any inhabitants this year.