Confession time.. and then I'll talk about something else. I promise.
1. Electricity and gas: Not bad. The rain and the temperature drop enabled me to convince someone that we could open the windows at night instead of running the A/C. Temperature is one of our biggest disagreements regardless of season and energy-saving efforts. Lucky for me this experiment is happening in summer instead of winter.
2. Water: Better because I'm not just letting it run, although again I have no good way to measure. I've saved at least a few gallons by watering my plants with the shower water.
3. Food and packaging: The Tuesday farmer's market is finally starting (today!) so I should be able to get nice local produce for the rest of the week. Again, we didn't start the vegan thing until yesterday, but I found some nice new recipes. Packaging is my biggest problem...I didn't order the reusable bags soon enough so they aren't here yet and I've had to shop without them. I am going to take some of my plastic to the market this afternoon, though.
4. Paper products: Good. I only had four cloth napkins so I made a set of 6 (with matching placemats in progress). Also I've been using rags quite successfully in the kitchen and bathroom.
5. Garbage: I am recycling now, and taking stuff to Goodwill as I declutter the closets, but the packaging problem still makes the trash fuller than I'd like.
6. Driving: Well... it's one of those trade-offs. We drove an extra 90 miles round-trip, but had four people in the car and came back with almost 50 pounds of strawberries and 4 bags of spinach from the u-pick farm. Now I have to drive out again to get canning jars and stuff for jam.
So in general, I don't feel that the week itself has been dramatically successful, but it did give me the incentive to actually start some things I'd only been thinking about, that will last longer than just this week. And isn't that really the point?
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
No comments:
Post a Comment