paradise ali

I’m a pack rat.  I hesitate to throw things away because "I might need it someday." 

I have almost half a closet full of evil plastic grocery bags.

It’s been coming to this for quite a while.  I am running out of space in the small hall closet and it is becoming increasing difficult to squish my vacuum cleaner and supplies in there without conking myself on the head and starting a small avalanche. 

With my rather large family, I can easily fill ten shopping bags per trip if there’s a good sale and I’m not careful.  We recycle the bags as trash can liners and rubbish bags.  I try to go "bagless" if possible and use my pretty, purple Chico Bags.  Still, the accumulation of bags in the closet is staggering.  What can I do with all these evil grocery bags?

The internet to the rescue!  There’s a site called My Recycled Bags.com and it has all sorts of ideas for turning the bags into nice looking purses, totes, wristlets, pot scrubbers, rugs and such.  The author cuts the bags into strips and ties them together to form "plarn."  Plastic yarn.  She then crochets the plarn into her fabulous creations.  Even better, this lovely lady "Cindy" or "RecycleCindy" shares her patterns for free!  How eco-consciously cool is that?! 

Making the plarn is easy enough.  My challenge is remembering how to crochet.  My grandmother taught attention deficit me to crochet and do embroidery (Okay, okay, she tried to teach me!) when I was in 2nd or 3rd grade and I actually crocheted a hot pink poncho some time thereabouts.  I attempted a baby blanket when I was in my 20’s and didn’t finish it. 

So here I am.  My goal is to cut a bunch of plarn and crochet something out of it.  I hope to make a bag but may start with something smaller and do baby steps.  I’m sure I can find a "How to Crochet" vid somewhere to help refresh my memory.  Either way, I’m making room in my closet and easing my eco-guilt. 

After all, I can’t just throw them away!  What if I need them later?!

It began when I was trying to think of ways to downsize our food budget.  We already drastically reduced the frequency of our takeout meals and eating out.  That, in and of itself, was a huge savings.  (I ain’t gonna lie.  We still hit the evil McD’s dollar menu on rare occasions.  It keeps the kids on their toes.)  So the next step was, what my hanai mom called, “stretching it.”  You know, instead of one steak per person for one meal, we’d have five or six meals of stir fry or stew or soup or something?  So there I was at our local grocery store craving stir fried green beans and when I saw the sign that said, “$6.00/lb.” I just about fainted!  I knew it was expensive but that was just ridiculous!  Ever since then, I’ve wanted to plant a garden in my backyard. 

When I was growing up we had a “hippie garden.”  Guess that was the unofficial local slang for organic?  I remember a lot of digging, long rows and rows of all kinds of vegetables and my folks weeding and fertilizing and watering and picking off any insect brave enough to snack on their crops.  To this day, I’m not sure if they gardened out of necessity and made it seem like an enjoyable hobby or if they truly enjoyed the hard work and the whole process.  I suspect the later.

A few years ago, the previous renters of our old house left an empty raised bed garden.  I planted mostly herbs like basil, thyme, lemon grass, rosemary, Thai basil, lemon basil, fennel, several types of mint, oregano along with the ever present green onions.  Once I planted them, they just grew like weeds on their own.  No maintenance.  It was gorgeous and the aroma wafting on the breeze was heavenly.  I didn’t really know how to use all of those herbs but I gave it away to friends and neighbors and savored what I could.  Now, I wish I would have grown vegetables.  I thought it was too work intensive and you know I was a couch potato back then.  But I digress . . .

The soil in my backyard is poor to nonexistent with lava rock patches here and there so I knew I’d have to do up another raised bed.  I started researching it and found this method called “square foot gardening.”  What I like in this method is that it utilizes a raised bed, there’s very little weeding, watering or fertilizing, and you can grow more in less space.  No need for those long row plantings my folks slaved over!  According to “All New Square Foot Gardening” by Mel Bartholomew, it uses (for the most part) only six inches of a growing medium called “Mel’s Mix.”  The garden can be placed in small spaces like on  an apartment lanai, on a patio, in boxes on steps, even on a table to allow for gardening while in a wheelchair.  How cool is that?!  There’s an official site, too.

I’ve started the string beans by a window in the laundry room and we should be able to transplant them and be up and running with the garden this weekend.  (Crossing my fingers and toes for good weather.)  We’ll see how it goes! 

Back in the beginning part of February, I bitched about wrote about our humongous January electric bill that increased by more than $100 since December.   Apparently I wasn’t the only one who complained.  Both newspapers ran an article by Jason Armstrong with different headlines, “Electric Bills Stun Isle Residents” in Hawai`i Tribune Herald and “HELCO Charges Customers Fuel Surcharge” in West Hawaii Today.  Our skyrocketing costs are, of course, related to the price of oil.   The image below from West Hawaii Today is an “average” user’s bill (we have a bigger family and a bigger bill) and an explanation of the itemized charges.  Note that, “Energy cost adjustment: Reflects oil prices”

 If we only knew two years ago that we could have easily rolled the costs of installing a photovoltaic system into our refinance, we would have jumped at the chance.  Unfortunately, we didn’t.  So faced with the rising costs of everything in our isolated, oil dependent paradise, here’s what we did:

· Switch out the light bulbs for CFLs.  They burn way less energy and last longer than traditional bulbs.  They may seem more expensive out of the box but they actually come out as a much better value.

· Reduce the temperature on the electric water heater.  Some people also put it on a timer with good results.  We’d like to eventually change over to a tankless heater or solar. 

· Take shorter showers and use a low flow shower head.  Conserves electricity (assuming the use of an electric water heater) and water, too.

· Turn off the lights whenever you leave the room.   Easy enough.  I have a friend who uses a motion detector to turn lights off and on.  He’s an electrical engineer and likes to tinker with things. 

· Use less lights.  We have two light fixtures in our living room and, most of the time; we only need to use one.  Same thing with using lamps and the overhead lighting at the same time.  We don’t really need to use the hallway light either. 

· Cut down the use of halogen lights.  These are usually the lights in the range hood and over the vanity.  It’s overkill unless you are doing detailed work. 

· Use Energy Star rated products.  When we moved, we needed to buy appliances.  Our old, small size, stand alone freezer used more electricity than our present full size, freezer on the bottom, refrigerator.  We don’t run the freezer anymore.  Our front loading washing machine not only uses less electricity but also less water and less detergent.

· Use the oven less and the toaster oven more.  If you do use the conventional oven, try to bake something along with the meal to do double duty.  Take advantage of the heat and bake up another meal or batch of cookies or other baked goodness immediately after.

· Use the stove-top less and the crock pot/grill more.   Instead of simmering in a stew or soup on the stove for hours, it can easily be done in a crock pot.  We have an electric grill/griddle thing and it’s faster than using a frying pan on the stove because it has more surface area–two batches of pancakes instead of four on the stove. 

· Keep the freezer full.  Buy in bulk, make your meals ahead of time and freeze them or even make ice cubes.  The freezer doesn’t work so hard and suck as much electricity if it’s full.

· Vacuum the coils in the back of the fridge. Don’t forget to unplug it first!  You may also want to use a dust mask if you are sensitive.  We had to remove a panel to get in there.  Eww!  It was disgusting in there! 

· Stop opening the refrigerator door.  It’s not like anything changed since I peeked an hour ago!  It’s a bad habit of mine that I’m changing.

· Put on layers of clothes and socks instead of running the heater/wear less clothes if it’s hot.  It gets pretty cold here (for us, anyway) and the heater felt so nice on those cold mornings.  Yep, until we figured out how much it costs to run the darned thing!  Ouch!

· Do full loads of laundry and use cold water.  Our kids would sometimes throw in three pairs of jeans and a shirt or something.  Wastage! 

· Use the clothesline when possible.  My hanai mom used to dry things on the line and when they were just about dry, she’d stick them in the dryer to “make ‘em soft.”  It rains fairly often here and I admit that I don’t use the line as often as I should but the method is sound and it does work.  I usually dry at least the rugs and delicates on the line. 

· Probably the biggest thing?  Unplug (or turn off at the surge protector) items you are not using.  It’s not enough to turn the TV or toaster or blow dryer off.  As long as they are plugged in, they are sucking electricity. 

Pretty simple, huh?  In March 2007, we used 41.8 kwh/day.  In January 2008, we used and average of 40.2 kwh/day.  In March 2008, we used 25.1 kwh/day.  This is the lowest bill we’ve gotten in years! 

When we bought our present home a few years ago, our plan was to pay rent for an extra month at our old place so that we would have time to set up the new house and sort through everything at the old house. The idea was to move only the things we really needed and wanted to keep and take the rest to donate or to the dump. Despite it’s size, our old home sure had a lot of storage space. Well, as the Universe would have it, our best laid plans were tossed out the window when we couldn’t extend our rental.

Our next plan was to move everything from storage in the old house to the storage in the new house. We threw baby clothes, school art projects, kitchen items, receipts, photos, text books, children’s books, and you name it into boxes and bags and hauled it all up here with no labels, no real groupings of like items, just a hurried mess. Fortunately, or unfortunately, we have a fair amount of storage in this house, too. We painted almost all of the interior living spaces, moved in new appliances, and settled in. The storage items? For the most part, out of sight, out of mind. Well, intermittently, we’ve gone out there and made a small effort but lately it’s been really nagging at me.

I just read “Celebrate Discardia Starting Today” over at Lifehacker.com and this fits so well with what I’m currently trying to do–clear out clutter. Not just physical clutter but also mental clutter, bad habits, anything that is no longer working for you. It was started at “Discardia” (Imagine that!) in 2003. What I like about this made up holiday is that it takes place in the time between the Solstices & Equinoxes and their following new moons. That means that the time varies and it happens four times a year. The first Discardia for this year starts today, March 19th and runs until April 5th. Perfect! There’s an end in sight and no pressure to hurry through it half assed just to finish because there’ll be other Discardias in June/July, September and December.