Saturday, February 28, 2009

Rotting food, sugary drinks, and too many towels to wash

So much for that post about the bokashi bin that never happened. Not that anyone's reading this blog, but I'm slipping on a lot of fronts so I need to 'fess up and stay accountable to myself here.

My beautiful bokashi bin finally arrived and I have set it up... so far all good in terms of there being no noticeable smell, but I'm giving it a few weeks of fermentation to see if that changes. One problem I've had is that it's bigger than I expected, which means it doesn't fit nicely into my kitchen. I've been experimenting with other places to put it, and for the moment it's on the dining room table - not the best and most guest-friendly place for a bucket of rotting food :S

In other news I've not only been having many many soft drinks, I've also had quite a bit of coke in the last two weeks particularly. BAD Jess. It got to the point where it was too many to be able to remember them all to put on my soft drink counter. I'm pretty mad at myself, but I'm making a new start today, which is all I can do. So from today: only water and tea, with the occasional fruit juice, coffee, or soda water with a dash of cordial. I decided the occasional coffee will be ok, as long as it's fair trade and organic (the reason I'm allowing myself this naughty caffeine drink is that on the days where I absolutely cannot stay awake, I'm finding myself giving in to getting coke - or worse, an energy drink - so I can make it through the day. If I allow myself A FEW coffees each week, maybe it'll be easier to resist the other evils...?)

My showers have been creeping past the 4min point, so SLAP on my wrist. I'm sitting at about 6-8min now, and there's NO excuse now that I have my beautiful little timer in the shower. Time to recommit to that, especially seeing as the last water bill told me I'm using 192 litres PER DAY, which is way under the government's personal target for each person of 155 litres. Hmm.

One thing that really annoys me is that our rental property only has a full flush toilet. It's a shame, because apparently about 20% of a home's water is flushed down the toilet so there's huge water saving potential there. I doubt there's any chance the landlord would put in a new toilet for rental tenants (?) so I'll just have to focus on other water saving tactics...

1. actually start using my shower bucket, and try flushing the toilet with this when I have got enough buckets worth (I've heard you can do this but have never tried flushing the loo without pressing the flush button... we'll see)

2. be strict with myself again about having 4min showers

3. Shave my legs BEFORE I have the shower so I can just rinse the soap off under the running water when I do start my shower

4. Guilty confession time... I usually use a different towel every day. What the? So, try to use towels for more than 1 day so I don't end up washing a load of towels every week

OK I think that's enough for now. I'll let you know how that all goes.

2 comments:

  1. Couple of things:
    I just started bokashi also. I buried my first bucket about a week ago & am really anxious to see how it works.

    For your water-wasting toilet - try putting something solid in the tank, a brick or something like that. Make sure it doesn't interfere with any mechanisms. Keep putting more in as log as the toilet is flushing properly.

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  2. ok I'll try the brick trick and see how it goes... hmm where to find a brick?

    Let me know how your buried bokashi bucket goes, I'm noticing a bit of a smell from my fermenting bucket now but it's not too bad.

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