No Impact...Day 6

Today's challenge was water.  I had big plans for this one.  I had even practiced last week.

This is bathtub laundry.  See Rowan's doll?  She's waving at you.

We had great fun stomping all over it.  We even used a natural laundry soap.  In the end it was a real pain.  Maybe if I only had a few items to wash every day this would work better.  So maybe what we should cut down on is how many outfits a 5 year old should wear in one day.  Just sayin. 

Although I won't be giving up my washer, I do have serious plans about the dryer.  I did in fact buy a laundry umbrella last summer.  Once it's installed then it will dramatically cut down on the use of the dryer.  That'll be a huge energy savings.

Back to the challenge.  Today was bill paying day.  Today I just happened to pay the water bill.  This time I took a good look at it.  I noticed something really great.  The No Impact information states that "The average American uses 1,189 gallons of water per day."  My water bill says we use 175 gallons per day.   And that's for 3 people!  So that's around 58.3 gallons per day for me compared to 1,189 gallons for the average American?  Yeah, I'm not cutting out my washing machine.  

I can very happily say that we aren't watering our yard or washing our cars on a regular basis.  Bath time is always a shared event.  Rowan, very often likes to dress as a mermaid and jump in. 

One weird thing I did today was weigh my mail.  On Fridays I go through the mail and pull out what we really need.  There's never much that needs our actual attention sooner than once a week.  Today I weighed the mail we really needed versus the mail we don't.  My results are 1.5 ounces of useful mail and 13.6 ounces of junk.  That has a lot of implications.  I'm receiving 13 times more stuff than I need.  The mail carrier is carrying 13 times more stuff than he needs to.  He's using more gas, etc. etc. than is 13 times necessary. 

Basically it was a low eventful day.  I did do my first canning project, which will be another post next week.  Tomorrow's challenge is Giving Back.  I'll be working at my real job for the weekend so I won't be volunteering time for any organizations in town as suggested.  I'm not sure I'll have anything to post, but you never how things will turn out.