Enviromental Footprint Update

I've been trucking along on my environmental footprint goals. I've been quite successful at keeping up with my composting, even incorporating some of our paper waste into our kitchen compost and tossing all of our dead tomatoes and yards cuttings into the bin. When I spilled the tumbler last week I discovered that I had, in fact, been largely successful in the composting process and just raked most of the compost across the garden patch and left it there. Unfortunately, I still had to shovel back in all of the green/rotting tomatoes. Pretty gross.

(Speaking of gardening, I grew pumpkins this year! It was very exciting! And then someone STOLE ONE. RIGHT OFF THE VINE.)

I haven't been as good about reducing my car usage. (Not that I had much to reduce.) I have managed to walk to the store instead of driving a few times, but then I've recently started driving to campus for some of my evening group meetings. Its just so cold and dark out, I don't want to walk back! I still walk to campus everyday though, and even sometimes twice a day for clubs and other meetings. I use a tank of gas maybe once a month.

And now we come to my goal of leaving the heat off until the end of October.

Sigh.

I was doing really well, for a while. I was wearing slippers and sweatshirts all the time, I had blankets everywhere, I put the electric blanket on my bed to warm it up for 15 minutes before getting into bed.

And then my mother came home. She's been turning up the heat to over 70 degrees in the living room, keeping the baseboard electric heaters blasting and drying the air out. Even turning down the heat doesn't help, because the heaters keep working for another hour. I've managed to negotiate her down to 65 degrees, but sometimes I come home from school and the heat is blasting.

Oh well. At this point, I turn down the heat because its too warm, and I'm stashing blankets everywhere. The heat still stays off at night, and everywhere but the living room and the bathrooms.

On a slightly random note, the habit of turning off the lights when I'm not in the room is so ingrained that I will turn off the lights even when someone else is in the room. This has led to some awkward moments when I turn off the bathroom lights while my mom is in the shower. Sorry mom!