One Size Fits All

Here are my June 2008 Riot 4 Austerity numbers. These entries are taking longer and longer to write. I think if  and when I do wind up using 1% of U.S. average of all the riot areas, I’ll spend most of my time writing about how I’m using so little energy thus using very little energy. A little recursion if you will.

Gasoline: In June I drove alot. I also rode my bike and I took the bus/subway. But I probably drove more this month than I have driven in my entire life. So that’s alot of driving. Most of my driving experience to date has been to move from one place to another.

I drove to my class, but the gasoline usage isn’t very much because I tried to get the hybrid as often as possible. For example I rented the car for one entire day last week. The pain from my shingles was awful and I had to do a few things, but didn’t feel like getting on a bus that shakes and vibrates and aggravates the pain, so I reserved the car all day and even though I drove 64 miles (including a trip to Greens Grow farm), the fuel indicator didn’t budge from being full.

Total distance driven in June 2008 is 1360.8 miles. When I reserve a car from zipcar their computer calculates exactly how many miles are driven after I return the car. I get a certain number of miles for free with every reservation per day which is included in the base rate, and then every mile above that has another rate. Phillycarshare is almost always booked at the locations I want and for the time I want so I rely on zipcar when Phillycarshare isn’t available (their cars are cheaper). I drove a car called Toyota Matrix to the funeral and the round trip distance was 909 miles. Gas is included with both car sharing services but when driving to the funeral I filled up 35 gallons worth of gasoline. Toyota’s website says the Prius gets 45 mpg which is the number I’m going to use to make the math simple. So this adds another 10 gallons to the total usage. So I used about 3 gallons of gas more than the average U.S. consumer. But if you look at the number from a household standpoint, that is about 22.5 gallons because my husband did come with me on our 909 mile trip. Still…I really f*cking hate driving after this month. I’d like to say that I never intend to drive ever again. But you know the saying, "never say never…"

Electricity: We used 368 kwh of wind powered electricity. And this is apparently 10% of the national average according to the riot calculator. I had the AC on for alot of the month because I thought my shingles were heat boils for awhile. And life was hard so we just enjoyed some luxury. I finally bought my first ever laptop. So hopefully the usage will drop a bit in July. We’ve also gotten better with turning off the powerstrips at night and before leaving for work in the morning.

Gas: We used 12 CCF which dropped from May’s 15 CCF. This is 15% of U.S. average. We showered alot more in June than previous months so again I am confused about this number. I like warm showers no matter what the season…so I don’t know why this dropped. As I mentioned last month, all our other water needs uses cold water: washing dishes, clothes, watering plants.

Garbage - Again forgot to weigh garbage. But it has gone up. Our worms died. So until we got some replacement worms (who are still in the processing of settling in), we didn’t want to put any  food waste in the compost bin and have it stink up the place. I should write about the fact that a compost bin smells (not always bad, but it smells) sometime. Does anyone know what a rainforest smells like? Because that is what the worm-compost advocates claimed a compost bin would smell like. I admit that this is why I was drawn to the idea despite the fact that I’ve never been in a rainforest and thus have no idea what a rainforest  smells like. Anyway…bottom line, I had to throw food waste in the garbage. The two of us eating what we do is actually too much waste for the worms. Until I read Chile’s wonderful account of making soup stock I didn’t think to save the veggie scraps, so I just composted it.

Water: Water usage went down and we used 2 cubic feet of water. I thought it would go up since we didn’t have much rain and I was watering my plants (cucumber, bell pepper, tomato) every day. But it didn’t. These numbers confound me. Also realized I’ve been calculating the numbers all wrong. The number in the table above is for both husband and me. Again: water here is used for drinking, cooking, bathing, washing clothes. Toilet flushes use grey water from the washer and bath. Since the water is soapy, the toilet is cleaned with every flush.

Consumer Goods: Oooo. The other biggie. I bought a toner for our laser printer (note: Staples takes old toners and gives a $15 coupon to be used for future purchases), another mouse for husband because…well, because he asked for it. I also bought some more menstrual pads from a woman on Etsy and the laptop. I also bought some toxic insecticide for the numerous houseflies that are driving me mad.  I’ll look more into natural remedies for the house fly (besides buying some praying mantis and frogs) now that life has returned to normal.

I just thought about the $10,000 average U.S. consumer purchases…what the hell do people buy every month for $10,000? Is Paris Hilton’s spendy habits included in here? It must be because I can’t figure out what on earth people could be buying that averages $10,000 every month. I mean how many fancy pants TVs could a single household own?

Edit: Ahem. I should quit complaining so readily. After reading JAM’s comment I realized that the amount is $10,000 per year and $833.33 per month. Table has been modified.

Food: Again. This is also off the charts in every way. For one, we ate out more in June than we did the entire year so far. We spent 11% of income on Dining.  Eating out not only included wonderful local-food supporting places like Farmacia but also crappy food places. I didn’t track specifics of what was organic and I bought alot of mexican soda this month. But I didn’t break everything down and its too hard to figure that out now. Suffice it to say Mr. Monbiot is shaking his head very sadly at me.

I have not been tracking the specifics of what I buy for food. So I just totalled up what I bought from the farmer’s market vs. the natural foods store to get the percentages. The farmer’s market provides me with local goods and food and the natural foods store provides me with organic stuff I can’t buy at the farmers’ market…such as rice.