Challenge Update

At the beginning of September I said I was going to go a month with no electricity use for entertainment, no unnatural light, and less sitting. I can honestly say that I accomplished two of those goals for the whole month. I lit the beeswax candles I found and used them for light. For the first couple of weeks I used the candles to read by but I was straining my eyes a bit to do it. I didn’t think bad headaches or eyestrain was worth it so I started using an LED book light to read. I did go around the house with my candles when I was doing other things like laundry or dishes. Overall I read a bunch but did nothing less that I could have been ding other than some chores.

Will I stick with it?

Not completely but it was a good way to catch up on reading. I will be playing some video games, though four days into the month I haven’t yet. I have a few movies I want to watch. But I will spend at least half of my nights reading with my little book light and my candles burning.

As far as other things we are accomplishing: we have our trash down to about an eight gallon bag a week, sometimes a little less, sometimes a little more. Everything else either gets recycled or composted. We are recycling less overall. Which is a good thing. Recycling is a delaying of things to the landfill but only a delay. We are getting much less packaging as we are going to public and farmer market’s and we are much better about brining our reusable bags with us. We became pescatarians (we predominately eat vegetables and eat fish 2 or 3 times a week; we still eat eggs and dairy).

As far as future goals:

Start growing some of our own food.

Find a way to take a bike to work.

Switch over to peak energy.

Not buy anything new that is not a necessity.