Carrie Loomis

This week I was really surprised by my eco challenge. I have been really noticing the changes I mad up until this week. I chose to add taking 5 minute showers and eating 1 vegan meal every day. I usually take pretty short showers so that was not a challenge at all. I thought that eating a vegan meal everyday would be hard for me, but I was pleasantly surprised at how natural it felt. I think I must have been eating a vegan meal everyday without thinking much about it  previously. In the upcoming weeks, I may try to upgrade to 2 vegan meals a day to give myself a bit more of a challenge. 

My one time challenge this week was to contact elected officials. I was also surprised at how natural this challenge felt. I tend to contact my elected officials fairly often, probably once every one or two months. At the start of this week, I thought that I would not have anything to say when I contacted them, but I totally forgot to do it for eco-challenge. Saturday night, I had contacted my senators to express my opinion on a particular policy and I only realized the morning after that I had fulfilled my one time challenge. 

This week, I am taking on more spiritual challenges.  I was inspired by our conversations last week about expressing gratitude. Because of this, I chose to try and express three things that I am grateful for every day. I also chose to meditate every day and I am hoping to meditate for 10 minutes every day. My one time challenge is going to be to make a health plan with my primary care physician. I am hopeful that this week will go just as good if not better than last week.

This week was much more challenging than last week. Mostly because classes are beginning to pick up and I have less time to set aside to manage the challenges. Both of my daily challenges this week were about waste. They were to prevent recycling contamination and use reusable bags. Preventing recycling contamination was relatively easy since I eat most meals in my apartment and can wash containers out before recycling them. This is something that I did most of the time before this but it was not yet a consistent habit. The bag challenge was much harder. On the off chance I go to the caf, I usually mindlessly grab a bag while I walk through the line. I think one day last week I grabbed the bag on accident and was immediately upset about it. I also went o the grocery store with a friend and we forgot all of our bags except for one giant IKEA bag. We fit all our food for the week in that one big bag (it was the heaviest bag of groceries I've ever held). I did not have to feel guilty afterwards for using extra plastic bags though, so it was worth it. 
My one time challenge this week was to learn about renewable energy. My high school used geothermal to heat he buildings and I never really understood how it worked, so I learned about geothermal. Its really interesting because it seems like it have very few drawbacks compared to other forms of energy. At my school, they put the geothermal pipes under the baseball fields so they had essentially no above ground land use, which I now realize is really cool!
It is really cool to see that the challenges that I implemented the first week, enjoying the sunrise and limiting social media, are becoming second nature now! I hope that this happens throughout the whole challenge and I can leave the challenge with many new good habits.  

My daily challenges for the last week were to limit my social media and enjoy either the sunrise or sunset every day. My one time challenge was to learn more about sustainable fashion and try to practice it in my life. Limiting social media has been difficult. When I am away from friends and family I use social media as a method of staying connected. However, social media definitely negatively impacts my mental health and limits the amount of time that I spend with my friends here. Limiting it has definitely been weird, especially when my friends aren't in the same situations. Watching the sunrise/sunset everyday is really easy and really nice for me. I wake up before the sun rises on Monday, Wednesday, and Friday for my morning classes. I sit after I wake up and watch the sun rise while I have a cup of coffee and it is a really good time to relax and center myself for the busy days I usually have. On Tuesday, Thursday, and the weekends, I have been watching the sunset instead which is a nice and peaceful way to finish the day as well. 
Learning about sustainable fashion was interesting to me. It was a weird challenge to undertake since I don't shop very often at school and especially with the public health crisis right now. Mostly I used this as a chance to try and learn something I had never known before and/or would not have learned otherwise. One of the things that I have been having trouble with grappling with is that to practice sustainable fashion, most people focus on thrifting and reusing. The large issue with this is that by shopping at thrift stores, we are often taking clothes away from the communities that these stores serve. For example, when I go and shop at goodwill, I am taking away from clothes that someone going through economic hardship could likely use better than I can. Do you think that there is a balance when it comes to this?
This week my challenges are to recycle and try to not use any plastic bags. This is especially hard on campus because of the dining situation. I already messed up today when I got lunch because I grabbed a plastic bag for my food. I think that throughout the upcoming weeks, I am going to have to focus and think through my actions more thoroughly to avoid slipping up again.