Well, I did it again, I let this blog go for a week. I have been busy, but really not that busy. I will start by saying that there were a lot of daily impacts of mine that will go unsaid. There are the sugar packets, the napkins, the bananas, the meat, the Ikea bacon, and probably many more. I do my best every day to keep these small things to an absolute minimum.
I do keep good records of my electricity and gasoline use, and I will report that now. The week's total power use for my house was 30 KWh. This total actually includes eight days of power, and 16 miles in the truck. Two of those days the meter sat still ( no grid power use ). There was some cloud cover on a few of those days, and I had to plug the fridge back into the grid. Why do I bother watching my power use? Well, beside caring for the planet, my last power bill was $ 35.00.
Most of my travel was with the electric scooter, but there were several trips on the Honda as well. The Honda trips added up to about 60 miles for about 10 pounds of CO2. Yesterday and today, I drove the van. The 51 mile total is responsible for about 40 pounds of CO2.
There were two things that I did this week which helped lower my impact on the planet. I had the starter fopr the van repaired at a local shop. This not only saved me $ 20.00 over a rebuilt one, it keeps the local economy going, saves the transportation of a starter from who-knows-where and back, and keeps the high-quality original equipment starter motor in my van. It is too bad that the local repair shops for electronics struggle because of our disposable society.
Along the lines of electonic repair, I was able to successfully repair a portable DVD player which was malfunctioning. The removal of a stray piece of plastic, and a little solder did the trick. I must admit that it took me about 2 1/2 hours to get this done, but it kept that little player working.
I have been doing pretty well staying away from red meat. I have eaten some chicken and fish, but have mostly been eating veggies. There is always that free Ikea bacon, but it is free, and it tastes so good!
I attended the #occupy Orlando rally on Saturday. It was encouraging to see people speaking out to try to improve things in this country. I think that the best thing for me to do is to buy from local businesses when ever possible. I am lucky that Publix is a local business, but I will need to make sure that more food which I buy from them is actually locally grown.
A scene from Occupy Orlando. ( I'm in the green on the left )
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