Note to self - check on the water!

http://www.guardian.co.uk/worldlatest/story/0,,-7030889,00.html
http://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,303716,00.html

The state of Georgia gets an average of 50 inches of rain a year, has numerous rivers and streams and several federally funded reservoirs to hold their "excess" water for public use. In spite of this embarassment of water riches (well, compared to most western states, anyway) the citizens of Georgia have effectively just about run out of water this fall. That's pretty scary, if you think about it. What caused this to happen?

A drought which began just a year and a half ago has definitely taxed water reserves. Critics also cite poor planning, which allowed several opportunities to build state funded reservoirs to boost the federal reservoir system to pass by the wayside due to corporate selfishness and political posturing. (One of the pushes to build more reservoirs was apparently deliberately scuttled when construction companies discovered they wouldn't be able to build and sell expensive, fancy homes on the new "lakeside lots"...) Another problem, at least reading between the lines here, seems to be rampant consumavore water usage by the 9 million residents of the state and a near total lack of planning to deal with the water needs of the state's burgeoning population.

Let's face it - a one year drought, while unfortunate, isn't enough to make a well-run state water system run nearly completely dry. Heck, I've lived in areas where the residents get by on a quarter of the annual rainfall that Georgia normally gets, and droughts of 5-7 years in a row are not uncommon. While the water situation at the end of a long drought can be pretty scary, I've never seen one even close to the desperate situation facing the citizens of the peach state now. All nine million of them.

If I'd had to guess a year ago which state would be facing a water crisis this year, I certainly wouldn't have named Georgia! I'd probably have guessed one of the western, water-poor states - but I suppose relatively water-poor states probably have a much better grasp of the need to conserve their precious fresh water supply.

It will be interesting to see what comes of this. When the current drama is over, will the citizens of Georgia learn to reign in their usage and invest in their fresh water infrastructure, or will they continue on blindly until the next water crisis hits and sit around pointing fingers at everyone else again? (If this situation doesn't illustrate the utter futility of relying upon governments and human cooperation and foresight to "save us" from climate change and Peak Oil, I don't know what does - nine million people sat around on their collective butts and let themselves run out of WATER, for pity's sake!)

Note to self: get some good, solid information on the municipal water supplies locally, and see how much more we can conserve here at home.

Making your own dishwasher detergent works!

We ran out of the stuff we normally use this week, and I figured this would be a good time to try the home-made dishwasher detergent recipe I've bookmarked on the sidebar (points to the link to non-toxic house cleaning "over there...") I wasn't sure how well it would work, and neither was my husband, but he agreed to give it a trial run. So we did.

I'm happy to report that it works at least as well as the stuff we've been buying in plastic bottles. My husband is still concerned that it might haze the glassware after a while, but has agreed to give it a longer trial to see if that happens. So we're using homemade dishwashing detergent for the time being. I'm a happy camper. Besides being a lot cheaper, it's also a lot less harmful to the waterways. I kind of miss the lemony smell of our old stuff (silly, I know - but every little bit of joy counts when doing drudgery work!) but not enough to keep using it if this keeps working out so well. I made a larger batch of the mix tonight, put it in a reusable plastic lidded tub, threw in a small salvaged scoop, and we're all set. (Hey, I just realized - no more toxic, hulking plastic bottles to discard, either! The ingredients all come in biodegradable cardboard boxes. )

Now I'm going through the other recipes I have marked to see what's next on the list. :-)

Putting one’s own mask on first

Global warming and climate change. Peak Oil. Economic collapse. Social unrest. War.

You can’t read news these days without reading a dire prediction of one stripe or another. Global warming, once an object of derision, is now becoming widely accepted as fact. Peak Oil is starting to make inroads into the public mindset, and we all know what is happening in the US stock market and in the Middle East. I’m not a betting person, but if I were, I’d say that given all the issues that seem to be coming to a head at the same time, it’s a pretty safe assumption that life as we know it is changing. It’s only a question of how much, how fast, and how soon.

A lot of other people are making this assumption, too. I see them all over the ‘net, trying to come to grips with the impending changes and grappling with the problem of what to do in the interim to prepare. This appears to be causing a lot of folks some serious anxiety. I see people every day begging for some sort of timeline, some sort of prediction they can use to build their plans around, but from what I’ve seen no one really has anything solid in that respect to offer. There are simply too many variables to consider, and too much we still don’t know about a lot of the issues driving things like global warming and climate change. We. Just. Don’t. Know. And that’s what seems to be driving everyone nuts.

I’ve also struggled with the question of what – if anything – I should be doing to help my community, my family and me weather the changes that are coming. Something happened this past week, however, that has helped me find my own particular path. This past weekend I flew to see my mother in another state (yes, naughty me, FLEW – but being in college full time I didn’t have time to spare to leave Thursday evening, then drive 16 hours each way and still make it back to class on Monday.) It was a typical airplane trip, cramped, noisy and smelly. But something from this trip caused a light bulb to go off in my head. During our preflight safety lecture, the attendant said something I’ve heard a dozen times before – but I heard it this time in a new way. He said “if cabin pressure should be lost, and you are traveling with someone who may need assistance, be sure to put your own oxygen mask on first, and then help that person with theirs.” In any emergency, it is the duty of the people who want to be able to help others to see to their own safety first. If they don’t see to themselves first, then they won’t be able to help anyone else. This is not selfishness; this is common, practical sense.

After thinking this through a bit, I realized that I have a lot of work to do in the next few years – on me. For instance, I’m currently overweight and out of shape. I waste far too much of everything, time included. I’m not nearly disciplined enough in my personal habits, and while I know more about living on basics and making things from scratch than most people, there are still a lot of areas I need to explore and skills I need to add before I can feel that I’m where I want to be. I also need to spend some more time working on my inner life – feeding my spirituality, managing my thoughts, dealing with my feelings.

What about helping others? Well, frankly - most folks aren't ready to do much in their own lives to prepare for an uncertain future. It may be years before the average person on the street, so to speak, even has this sort of thing showing up on their radar. Spending much time on "spreading awareness" at this point is probably a waste of my time and effort. So the choice facing me is - do I spend this time in such a way that I can become a more whole person and be able to better help others when needed, or do I continue to live as I have in the past and as a result have little to offer anyone else when crunch time hits?

This week, after thinking hard on that choice, I have made the decision to put my own mask on first.

Adding miles biked/walked

I need some incentive and a way to keep myself motivated to walk or bike instead of drive, so I've added a new counter to my blog sidebar. I hope to see that tiny little number go way high in the next few months! But at any rate, it'll help me to be able to see my progress, and that's a good thing. Every few weeks I'll calculate how much gas I've saved, as an added bit of reporting.

Hey, it's worked with the plastic bags, and it's a good reminder for me that even little changes add up in time.

The Fed is doing what???

From the front page of Reuter's online. On the 1/2% rate cut a while back, ALAN SKRAINKA, CHIEF MARKET STRATEGIST, EDWARD JONES, ST. LOUIS sez:

"This is very good news. The Fed is taking out a little insurance policy. Maybe they were a bit behind but now they're catching up. They're on the ball, they're mining the store, and will take aggressive action to prevent the economy from slipping into recession."

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Wow. Any way you define "mining" it appears we have honesty in Economics at last.

Nanking Cherries and Niches

When we moved into this house three years ago, we inherited a very nice fruiting Nanking Cherry hedge. It's very pretty in the spring, has nice dense foliage in the summer, and makes tons of itty bitty "cherries." The problem is, although the cherries have an interesting flavor when freshly picked, they have largish pits for their small size, they are not very strongly flavored and the flesh is very watery. That means they aren't really good for fresh eating, pies, or jam. Most people here grow the bushes as ornamentals and let the birds have all of the fruit. But what we've discovered is they do make a tasty juice, and using the steam juicer to process them seems to concentrate their mild flavor. The resulting juice is good warm or over ice with a touch of sugar to counteract the tartness and bring out even more of the cherry taste.

This year we juiced all of the cherries we picked. We still had a couple of gallons of the juice after drinking our fill of it straight, so I made cherry syrup with some of it and then tipped a bit of vinegar "mother" into one of the partial gallon jugs and let it sit for three months in the storage room. I just took the vinegar out today to check it and POW! That's some great vinegar, if still a bit brash, so I'm letting it sit and mellow out till the end of the year. The other jug sat waiting in the fridge over the summer (it was pasteurized by the steam juicing so it was as good as "canned.") Today I took it out and checked it and then dropped a sterilizing Campden tablet into it just for good measure. Tomorrow I will drop some Montrachet wine yeast in there and let it turn into cherry wine. I have a jug of plum juice from earlier this week sitting right alongside it that will be turning into plum wine at the same time. These will be my first batches of homemade fruit wine. It should be an interesting project! Apple cider vinegar and apple wine are next on the roster. Then it's time to start some meads and beers for the dark winter months.

The thing I like most about this is feeling like I've finally found the best use, a "niche" if you will, for the Nankings. It's a good feeling to take something that is only marginally useful or currently under-used and turn it into something more valuable. We have two sweet cherry trees growing up that will eventually provide us with cherries that are much nicer for eating fresh, making jam and pies, and general canning. But thanks to discovering that niche, the Nankings will always have their special spot in the pantry as vinegar, syrup, juice and wine.

101 Uses for Plums

101 Uses for Italian Plums is a book I want to write some day. We have tons of plums every year - well, not tons, but we do get at least 60 pounds a year from our three immature trees in the back yard. That's a lot of plums.

The first year we were here we ate a bunch of them fresh, and dried the rest. The second year we branched out into jam. Our third fall here we added home-fermented plum vinegar - which turned out to be some of the best vinegar either of us had ever tasted. This year, our fourth, we are drying some, juicing some for vinegar, plum syrup and possibly a small batch of plum wine, and making some into plum puree for jam and sauces. I'm already planning to make plum butter and plum conserve with some of the puree.

Along the way we've discovered several interesting uses for dried plums. For instance, dried plums make a wonderful Plum Walnut bread. They also can be diced and make great substitutes for raisins in cookies and baked goods. We're also planning to mince a few of the dried plums and add spices and dried raspberry leaves to make our own Plum Spice herbal tea for winter. I plan to try some of our dried plums in a plum "pudding" for the holidays this year, as well.

Our three trees are nowhere near their full size, so I won't be shocked if in five years our harvest is closer to 100 pounds every fall. But if I can keep finding new ways to use them, it'll be worth all the work to put them up. When we start to get more than we can comfortably use for these recipes, I guess we can always juice them and just can the juice for drinking straight. But that's about as far as my imagination has taken me on this, so I suppose I need to get out Google and see what else I can find.

It's a lot of work to grow, harvest and process all this fruit, but it's a comforting sort of work. In the process, we are learning how to use more of what we have to make staple foods and tasty treats and condiments our family loves to eat. If all the vinegars we make this year turn out, we will have all the tasty vinegar we need to make salad dressings, marinades and other condiments this next whole year. We are already self sufficient on jams and jellies and fruit syrups for pancakes and home-made sodas. We haven't bought raisins in months. And I managed to re-create one of our favorite artisan breads in a healthier whole grain version, using mostly local or home made products. So besides being good food and giving us interesting projects to do, it's also helping us to live a more sustainable life in general. Little steps? Yes, but if you take enough little steps eventually you will get where you want to go.

The only problem is, all the apples are ready next!

It finally happened...

...someone got cranky about my reusable bags at a small town grocery store the other day. :-(

But, after listening to this elderly guy complain for several minutes, I kind of got the feeling he gets cranky about a lot of things. So I'm not going to let it worry me. I explained to him why I used them, but he didn't seem to care. When I politely asked, he couldn't even tell me why he didn't like them. All he seemed to care about was that they were different from what he is used to using when he bags groceries and he didn't like "different." This wasn't a Wal-mart superstore or anything, either - it was just a laid back small town grocery store with just a few customers checking out at any given time - so even if it did take him a few seconds longer to bag stuff up with an unfamiliar bag, I doubt it really added that much extra work to his day.

I found his excessively grumpy attitude both mildly amusing and mildly annoying. I kind of hope someone talked to him after his complaining fit, because at least in my case it made me think less of the store and may make me a little reluctant to shop there again. But I'm definitely not giving up my bags. Can't please all the people all the time, eh?

The numbers are in....

...and over the past three weeks we've driven 655 mostly-city miles on the big family SUV-type wagon, which got only about 16.3 miles per gallon on average. So over that three weeks we burned about 40 gallons of gasoline. That means we used 13.33 gallons per week driving over 200 miles during each 7 day time frame. Extrapolated out over the course of a year, that means we will average about 693 gallons of gasoline used in one year.

Okay, so now I know. Eeek.

Fifty percent of that would be getting my gas usage down to 6.5 gallons per week. Time to pump the bike tires up, I think, and ride to school and the library tomorrow. I'll reset the trip meter and fill the tank back up, and see where I am in a month's time.