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. 

These are the size of cherry tomatoes one would get at the grocery store but I am not sure if that’s how large they’re supposed to be since I grew it in a pot (or planter as home depot calls them). I’m learning that if I grow something in a pot I’m going to get miniature version of whatever it is that’s growing.

These are Siberian Tomatoes. I bought the seeds from Seed Savers and its a determinant early yielding tomato. I started the seed on January 5th of this year and they began yielding fruit about two weeks ago. I am not sure how "early" this is since I was able to get tomatoes from the farmer’s market in May (as well as hydrophonically grown ones). Seed Savers does say that these are "dwarf" variety…so maybe they are the right size?

Besides the cost of the seed (packet of 25 cost $2.75) I didn’t spend much money growing these tomatoes. The pot was under $10 from home depot. The soil was the compost and was entirely from my compost bin. I only began watering them in June because we had some steady rain from March onward when I placed them outside. And I didn’t have to act as some sort of sex expert on these tomato flowers because we had some visitors. That’s right, bees actually showed up to sex up my tomato flowers. I was so happy when I first saw the first bee that I had to check online to see that what I had seen was indeed a bee and not some other pesky bug.The only problem I had with the plant was some sort of white mould early on which was apparently caused by overwatering. So I learned to check the soil before watering. The cure for getting rid of the mould was to spray the mould areas with a mild soap solution.

So what did I do with these tomatoes? I made salsa, because my salsa is the best tasting salsa to me: Cilantro and lime juice is not local.

So I need to increase our savings and to do so I’ve joined Chile’s Quit Now Challenge where I promise to eat all but four meals at home. Everything else I do is now a habit so I don’t think we can save any more money there.

——————–

Today I gave notice to our landlord that we’d be vacating in 2 months. So…for the first time in my life I am swimming blind and liking the excitement. My husband and I have three plans and they are:

1. One of us will have a job offer before the end of August in California (maybe L.A.). So we’ll just move and get an apartment and that’ll be that.

2. We’ll just move and then scrounge around for jobs living off our savings until we get jobs. I am not too crazy about this plan because I feel it may mean living in a crappy neighborhood (because that’s where the cheap apartments will be) again. And really, I almost want to live in an exclusive gated community at this point since I am so sick of living in crappy places. I had this grand idea that getting a degree would bring me all this wealth that would enable me to live in nice places. I obviously didn’t count on that pesky value called "ethics" which makes me quit all the lucrative jobs I’ve held to date.

3. Bike trip across the country. This is obviously the more insane idea. But its the one we’re both most excited about even though it goes against all my normal ideas of safety nets and whatnot. If we decide to do it, I’ll write a bit more about this plan.

Then of course is the question, why move at all? Well, I don’t think I’ve mentioned it but I’m ready for a change. Philly is a nice city and everything, but I’m really sick of it. My husband is sick of it. We’ve been here for a long while and both of us has been wanting to move for a while but one thing or the other kept coming up. Now that we don’t have anything holding us back (except my comfy job), its high time we move.  There are a million things I hate about this city (moving from neighborhood to neighborhood didn’t help) and I think its me more than the city. Additionally, there might be three of our friends moving to CA in the same time frame as us so that will be exciting.

I finished reading Hope, Human & Wild by Bill McKibben last week.The book is a collection of three stories that promote a message of hope against…a world where resource depletion is almost a contest. The stories are detailed from McKibben’s perspective which may be why I wasn’t too thrilled with the book. I’ve watched McKibben in many documentaries and he seems to have a rather negative world view. Its probably justified considering the number of years he’s been writing about the environment and global warming to seemingly no avail.

The first story is about McKibben’s own backyard: the Adirondack region where he lives. The story detailed is almost an echo of the story of Pennsylvania.

A few years back, I had read an article in the Philly Inqy that mentioned how green Pennsylvania currently was, how there was this canopy of green covering the state. The  reason this story was significant is the same reason McKibben chose to include the Adirondacks in his first story of hope - the North East portion of the U.S. was the first to get completed raped of its resources: trees, minerals, oil, etc, etc as it was one of the first areas to get settled by Europeans. So with the demand for mahogany desks and whatever else people wanted, millions of acres of forests disappeared. Then, just in the nick of time the Louisiana Purchase was sealed and new virgin territory expanded the U.S. borders which came under intense exploration. This gave the depleted North East portions of the U.S. some time to recover. Today new forest growth has changed the N.E. landscape and everything now is just dandy.

Except it isn’t.  Because of how the U.S. economy has changed its focus from one that agricultural and manufacturing based to one that is service based, many of the residents in McKibben’s community live at poverty level wages. And its sad. So the change that the residents make are often into sectors that isn’t feasible in the long term. Shasha Cedar discussed this recently.Not exactly hopeful…but the hope part of this story came from the fact that many of the original native wild animals are beginning to make their way back into the Adirondacks because of the new forest growth.

The second story of hope was my favorite.The subject was a city in Brasil named Curitiba. Its success as a model city that continues to grow with low resource consumption was primarily due to the efforts of its three-time mayor, Jaime Lerner, who implemented a wide variety of programs that had a wide reaching ecological impact. Many of Lerner’s ideas were similar to Jane Jacobs’ ideas and observations in Life and Death of Great American Cities. And the programs worked. For example, Curitiba’s bus system sounds amazing: bus only lanes with connecting routes with buses that run frequently. Old buses get transformed into classrooms that teach people practical skills for a low fee. Another example of Lerner’s ingenious thinking was how he dealt with the flooding problem. He designed and created artificial lakes with parks surrounding the lakes that get filled during the flood season. Lerner also took one of the suggestions from the authors of Rubbish by incentivizizing rubbish collection - so now the bums get a meal and the streets are clean.There was alot of hope here…if we can elect decent people who care enough.

The third story…well I’ve already written about my feelings but I should say a bit more. The story of Kerala and its low resource consumption in the face of other measures of success makes it an anomaly in India and even the rest of the world. But there is a similarity between Kerala and Curitiba - its leaders/elected officials. The leaders of both places cared enough about their people and their home to do something to make it better. They implemented programs with the blessings of the people and listened to their concerns to make life better…

RATING: 3 out 5 stars.

READERS: medium to dark green readers.

- From the Dead Milkmen’s "Moron"

I’ve gone back to using toothpaste. I got nervous about having many dreams in which I look at my reflection in a mirror and see myself with a bloody mouth. The dreams could have been arising from my fear of not using toothpaste or it could mean that I’ve been watching episodes of Buffy and find vampires fascinating.