by solveeczema | Jun 25, 2008 | About Products
Check this out – someone is selling already grated soap for making your own soap-based laundry powder:
http://www.soapsgonebuy.com/
They sell Borax in bulk, too. I can’t for certain say that all of their products are non-detergent, but most seem so. (I would be careful to check out the unscented “powder” first by asking them directly, because they don’t say what brand of hard soap they start with or what ingredients are in it. However, they do seem to know the difference between “old-fashioned lye soap” and detergent.)
The site also has a section with laundry powder recipes using grated soap.
by solveeczema | Jun 10, 2008 | Off Topic Posts
I finally got my medical insurance appeal in the mail last Saturday. The package weighed 11 pounds! I hurt my hand trying to finish it – I have never had a technological strain injury before. Ouch!
My copy of the appeal also weighed 11 pounds. The stack I had to make just prior to this weighed 15 pounds – 7.5 pounds for me, 7.5 pounds for the lawyer helping me produce the letter to go with the most recent 11 pounds of paper – ironically produced on Earth Day.
It’s hard to even contemplate the wasted effort – mine, and that of millions of other Americans.
by solveeczema | May 25, 2008 | About Products
I’m still up to my, ahem, bootstraps in medical insurance appeal paperwork, but I thought I’d pass along a great article I just came across about so-called natural cleaners. It’s not about the detergent issues I discuss in solveeczema, but it has a good general discussion about less than scrupulous marketing in the “natural” cleaning products industry and a wonderful list of links, with all non-detergent and non-toxic cleaning suggestions at the end. Scroll down to the very end of the article for the suggestions.
Link to article
I hope I’ll get a breather from all this BS insurance paperwork soon. (What? My insurer chose those initials…) I will get back to the site and blog, and especially to overdue correspondence, as soon as I can.
by solveeczema | Apr 5, 2008 | Off Topic Posts
My apologies to everyone to whom I owe correspondence, and there are many at the moment. I am battling a particularly vicious bout of health insurance paperwork. They used to say “the cure is worse than the disease”; the sage person who coined the phrase must have had the same insurance as I do.
I know I have many times complained that if only I had a fraction of the time and effort we must spend on health insurance paperwork to do virtually anything else – this web site, see family, live our lives… It’s absolutely oppressive. Unfortunately, with US healthcare insurance, it’s too often your money or your life (or both).
People from countries outside the US probably can’t imagine this situation. This New York Times article gives a sense of what it is like, and it’s only getting worse. Just the EXCESS paperwork that private insurance companies generate costs our system around $350 billion annually (that’s above and beyond the $100 billion or so that we spend annually on health care administration that would, generously speaking, be necessary to administer any system like this regardless), and that doesn’t count the hundreds of billions more the insurance companies get in windfall from delaying and denying care or reimbursements through that paperwork. The result? In the US today, LESS THAN HALF of the $2 trillion dollars spent on healthcare every year go to actual CARE. (source: Public Citizen)
Never accounted for in these cost equations is the enormous toll on the lives of ordinary citizens who are targeted by this paperwork – and the disastrous personal and financial consequences when they lose. Half of all personal bankruptcies in the US are from medical costs, and the majority of those people have insurance at the start of the illness that bankrupts them.
Even doctors in this country, who have traditionally been against change are now in the majority for a nationalized payment system [Reuters story]. And no, I do not think doing this will make us Communists anymore than having publicly-financed universal sanitation (the greatest medical advance in human history and a characterizing difference between first and third world economies), where even poor people have the luxury of bathing in drinking water, did. In fact, I think it makes the most BUSINESS sense.
Sorry to get so upset, I’m sure I’ll have regrets for getting so emotional and off topic and delete this post at some point. I did not post this to begin a discussion about health care in the US, there are better places to take such a discussion [link]. But my life is so dominated by this, I needed to say something. (For the record, I have private insurance through the federal government – meaning, all the disadvantages of private insurance but none of the protections of state insurance laws. The Senators running for President are all running around saying we should have the same coverage they do – well I have the same PLAN as they do, I wish they would tell Me-Non-Congressperson how to get the same COVERAGE!)
So please bear with me, I will get back to you as soon as I can!
by solveeczema | Apr 5, 2008 | About Products
I just ran across a promising resource: soapnaturally.org. The site is mainly for soapmakers, but there is a page with links to people who make traditional soaps around the world.
I have not been able to check all of them out – sometimes people claim to be traditional soapmakers, but they use raw materials that contain detergents (even SLS), so it’s important to check first. The sites I checked clearly described the soapmaking process on their sites, so they are true soap makers. (I have not used any of these products.)
