Partially Greener

The Story of Stuff...

...is a powerful one. Check out this video with Annie Leonard.

Annie does a fabulous job of illustrating how hooked on stuff we are. It's scary how much we define our worth based on what stuff we have. It's even scarier that only a very small percentage of that stuff remains in use six months after we buy it.

What would happen if we stopped consuming so much? Would the U.S. economy collapse? Would the world economy collapse? Would we be better off? What do you think?

Who wants a clean house?

I'm feeling a bit hesitant about our latest step in our quest to become partially greener. We fired our cleaning people. While I hate to clean, having them come just didn't make sense (and was less than frugal). Think about it:

1. Cleaning lady packs her car with non-earth-friendly, toxic cleaning supplies
2. Cleaning lady drives over 30 miles from her house to ours, burning precious fossil fuels and polluting the air
3. Cleaning lady applies non-earth-friendly, toxic cleaning supplies to surfaces in our home
4. Cleaning lady packs her car and drives back home
5. Andy and Rory write a $260 check each month

Who'd have thought that clean toilets caused so much impact to our environment?

Rory and I have made the commitment, and will begin keeping this place clean on our own, effective immediately. We're disposing of most of our hazardous household cleaners at the local hazardous waste drop-off site, and we're replacing them with Meyer's more earth-friendly products.

We'll see how this goes. Hopefully we won't fall into such uncleanliness that we'll be condemned!

DIY: Yogurt Making!

Rory and I were talking the other day about how nobody knows how to do anything on their own anymore. For example, how many of you know how to make your own bread (using that bread-making machine your grandma gave you doesn't count), sew a blanket, or knit yourself a sweater? Probably not very many of you. At our household, we're going to try to learn to do some of those types of things on our own again.

Rory took on our first project: yogurt making! Here's how the whole thing went down...

First, we started by rigging up a double-boiler. Once we got that set up, we began heating a quart of milk. We used locally-grown, hormone free milk from Picket Fence Creamery. We continued to heat the milk until it reached 160 degrees.

Once the milk reach 160 degrees, we removed it from the heat and put it on a cooling rack.

We left the milk on the cooling rack to let it cool to approximately 110 degrees.

While the milk was cooling down, we brought a kettle of water to a boil, then used the boiling water to sterilize the glass jars we planned to use to hold the yogurt.

Once sterilized, we let them dry. If we were really being green, we would have poured the water back into a pitcher, let it cool, then used it to water plants, but we weren't that creative at the time.

Once the milk reached 110 degrees, we stirred in a half container of regular plain yogurt. You need to do this to get cultures to cause the milk to turn into yogurt. As an alternative, you can purchase just the cultures, but they are more expensive than just buying a container of yogurt.

We stirred the yogurt in pretty thoroughly.

Next, we poured our yogurt mixture into a bowl with a lid to ready it for the next step of the process.

Next, we needed to keep the mixture between 95 and 110 degrees for six hours. Our way of accomplishing this was to set up a small cooler with a heating pad inside of it.

We then put the lidded glass container in on top of the heating pad.

Next, we stuffed a towel around the edges to prevent any heat seepage.

Then we closed the cooler tightly and left it that way for the next six hours.

Six hours later, we had yogurt. We took it out, stirred it, then poured it into smaller (consumable) containers...reusable, of course!

Once separated, we added a little fruit to each container, then put them in the refrigerator for several hours.

Once cool, we had the finished product.

It was really good! We've made it a few times now (both with fruit and without). I prefer the fruity version, because I think it has more taste. Rory likes the plain stuff, because he puts it on top of baked oatmeal.

Any suggestions on what we should attempt next?

Ding, dong...

...the garage fridge is gone!

I don't even miss it and I'm $200 bucks heavier! The best part is that I sold it to a young man whose refrigerator conked out on him, so he really needed it. I feel better about that than I would have felt about selling it to someone else who would be using it as a second refrigerator.

Everyone wins!

Baby, It's Cold Inside

Crazy idea numero uno: turn the furnace off. And that's precisely what we did yesterday afternoon.

When Rory was still working in Coralville, a coworker of his was telling him that her parents don't run their furnace at all during the winter months. At first, Rory thought that was a crazy plan, but after talking with her, he learned that their big, old farmhouse never got below the mid-50 degree range, which sounds chilly, but at least tolerable.

As we talked more about it, we thought it would be fine. After all, Rory's coworker's parents lived in a big, old, leaky farmhouse and were able to live without heat. We are in a newer, EnergyStar compliant townhouse - we just needed to suck it up and switch off the heat.

So we took the plunge yesterday at approximately 2 p.m. Rory did the honors, flipping up the thermostat cover and sliding the little switch from the "heat" position to the "off" position.

By 7 p.m. we were still doing pretty well. It had only cooled down to 64 degrees and it was time to make supper, so we knew that would warm things up a degree or two.

We ate dinner on the couch, under a blanket while we watched a movie. We were coping well, but Moda (one of our dogs) felt that her winter coat was no longer cutting it, and insisted that she be let under the blanket as well.

By bed time we were still in good shape as temperatures still hadn't dipped below the 64 degree mark inside. We climbed into bed and managed to keep the dogs out, which was a success in my book.

All was good until about 6 a.m. this morning. Rory cracked. The dogs had been restless all night and he was getting cold too. He ran downstairs to find that we were at 58 degrees, and, without a bit of remorse, flipped the heat back on.

So, we're compromising. We won't go back to our old ways, keeping the house at a balmy 68 degrees, but we won't be extremists and go without heat, either. We're going to try keeping it at 64 degrees during our awake hours at home, and drop it down to the low-sixties at night. Hopefully that plan will keep the dogs out of bed and our energy consumption from being sky-high!

Partially Greener

Our household is going to become partially greener in 2008. Rory and I made our resolutions for the new year, and decided we wanted to begin living a more sustainable lifestyle. I plan to use this blog as a way to document our activities on the subject and share them with you.

There are a lot of blogs out there on being green and living sustainably, a good number of which I read. I'm hoping this one will be a bit different. Neither Rory or I profess to be experts on green living (I work in HR and Rory works in telecommunications). We're truly figuring this out as we go.

I'm looking forward to celebrating our successes and to learning from our failures. I hope you'll share in the fun and participate by challenging our views and providing us with new, exciting ideas as we attempt to live a lower-impact lifestyle.

-Andy