hello again!

the week that just passed has been filled with activities. University/college has started so i have tried that life out a bit. The course in sociology seems really interesting. the only problem being that the admissions board have dropped me from the course which means that i am not allowed to be there.
i will see if i can argue the case on tuesday next week. if they refuse to give me grades for it, i will see if i can sit in class anyhow. i will be there just to learn and they don't need to put me in their particular system. I have paid for the course so that is not the problem.
i am beginning to think that it's a private witch hunt against me. i don't have energy to tell you about all the road blocks i have run into during admission,translate transcripts etc etc....but believe me it's a few.
so i am feeling very drained by the whole system that(at this point in time) feels more like a dinosaur beaurocrazy than a learning institute. I hope that my initial view of okanagan college will improve.I hope that soon they will actually allow me to learn something which is why i am here.


beside this little minor annoyance i have had a good time. it was peter's birthday on the 8th so i took him to a cabin on top of larch hills. the cabin was very rustic so we had to carry pretty much everything we needed.
therefore i had packed a ton and we lugged it all uphill on skis. he didn't look too pleased as he struggled up the hill with a heavy load.

i was beginning to think that it's a bit cruel to give a workout as a b-day prezzie.
once we got to the cabin and dropped our packs and started a nice fire though he looked pleased as punch. it was a beautiful evening, away from everything,stars in the sky and snow on the trees.


we gorged ourselves on the goodies i had brought along. half because we were ravenous after a good hike up and half so that we didn't have to carry them down again.
going down proved a lot easier at first.....until my ski boot cracked in half. i think i must have put it too close to the fire over night and it had dried it out completely. the other factor that could play a role is that the boot was made at the beginning of time and might be feeling it's age.
anyway, this cracked shoe left me with absolutely no steering ability. when i finally slowed down and landed soft in a pile of snow the repair kit came out. i jury-rigged it with rope to tie it back together and this took a few trials until it was as good as new.

in the same manner as last week i have been recording my impact of the environment.
i have a lot of numbers and no real knowledge as to what they mean and what i will use them for. i figured that as i jot down my life as a calculation i will learn aspects of it that i wasn't aware of.
Take electricity for example.

The first weeks usage was 31 811.55W that is for one person- minus the freezer, fridge and washing machine.
to me that sounds like an awful lot. This was during a week when i was very conscious of my lights etc and tried to turn off stuff as much as possible.
so what does these numbers mean.
well i am not sure. one thing i know however is that it would be very hard to power our house with the energy creating bike that peter has created.
we calculated that in order to achieve 4200W we would have to cycle 6hrs a day for 7 days a week. we are still not even a quarter to the number thirty-one thousand eight hundred eleven and fifty five!!!w.
isn't that crazy.

I don't know yet how much an average household use. not that it matters so much.even if i don't use as much as someone else i still need to lower those numbers by a lot to make a self sustainable home a reality.

moving on to water consumption and i found after i added the numbers on the research sheet that i had consumed at least 800litre by myself in the last week. then i think about people in poor countries that have to walk for miles and miles to get a bucket (25 litre?)of water that is carefully used because of the scarcity and hard labour involved in getting it.
our way of life is not fair and it is not sustainable. how can we in rich societies assume that we should have all these privileges and not share them with people in poorer countries.
according to the coursebook in sociology the richest 20% of world population takes 80times more of the communal cake.(john j macionis)
if you had a kid like that at your birthday party you would call him/her a greedy,spoilt brat with no manners.

i guess i have to try harder still to become less of a negative impact on the planet.
i will continue to let you in on my research as i go.
for now...got some anthropology to study:)
lots of love
miki

week one findings/weak one finds

hello there you people!
good to see that you still check my blog even after my fanatical environmental project has begun.
it's all good.

so this last week has been interesting.
I guess you saw the research sheet i made up for myself to record everything in everyday life. Well it proved to not be enough. I still had missed vital aspects that previously i had just taken for granted. For instance the need for electricity to even get the water pumped into the house.
All you people with houses...(sigh now and say ahh that young and naive girl...tell us something we don't know:))
Then just the energy to heat up the water for say a 5min shower.
I took a shower the other day for 10 minutes and that alone used 64liter of water. Then add the electricity to get pressure 125W and warm it up(not sure how to calculate this yet), plus light in the room 7W.
Each and every activity has it's consequences. I guess the consequences would be worse if i decided not to have any showers at all. Losing friends, work etc etc.
Still this lesson showed the importance to me(If australia didn't drive the point home with it's water shortage)to get in,get clean and get out without time for lingering and daydreaming.
I have also started an interesting little experiment to see how much of hygienic products i actually do need and what they consist of.
I have been trying to do without shampoo this last week and my hair feels shinier and healthier than it has the last 5 years. perhaps a little bit greasy but i figure it will stabilize itself when the hair gets used to having to regulate itself.
I am still not ready to give up on conditioner...on the lookout for a local brand with no toxins added.

The little cleaning i have done this past week has been done relying solely on vinegar and baking soda. I tell you that stuff really works. besides i can buy it in bulk at work so i don't even need to get plastic containers.

one thing that was an eyeopener this last week was how much water the toilet takes each time you flush 16liters approx each time if you have an old toilet like the one i do.
So to combat this there are a few ideas floating around. one is to add a bag of pebbles to the canister that holds the water so that it doesn't fill full each time and in this way conserve water.
since i am lazy i employed the method of not flushing each time (if i only had a wee,let's just have ideas floating around) but instead i just threw in a litre or so of water to dilute the piss to make it less smelly.
this seemed to help to get my water usage down by at least half.

I remember living in dalarna in a little house where i had a compost toilet instead. the wee was separated from the poo to eliminate odour. then the poo and sawdust was put in a pile in the garden and covered with leaf and clippings from the garden. it disappeared in no time. Far better than washing our excrement away with perfectly fine drinking water.
vernon is on a high plateau and is very low on water, it is almost classified as a desert here so in the summer this water-squandering makes no sense.


completely irrelevant pix from oz speaking of shit.did you know that cows emit huge amounts of methane gas from their dung and constant burping(you would too if you had eight? stomachs).
me in my get-up as a milkmaid in bunbury.

So for those of you who thought i could not possibly get any grubbier, i have decided to not wash my clothes as often as i now do. just one load of laundry used 180 litres of water. i intend to see how much longer use i can get out of my clothes if i air them between uses instead of automatically throw them in the dirty washbag.
within reason of course...i still want to employed and be allowed to take part in classes at school.
i believe that the clothes in themselves would last longer if they were washed less often and less warm.
i am trying to use a warm wash with cold rinse. if i can get away with cold wash and a cold rinse i will do that. This would all depend on the situation of course. i remember when me and Holly tried to carry a dead dolphin ashore in bunbury australia. I had it's fishy smell covering my clothes for days on end. two hot washes later and the clothes still smelled like blubber.

Enough about water.
The trickiest to figure out actual numbers for has been groceries and where they come from.
here in canada they don't specify as much where a product is grown. it's easy enough to know where a company is based but where they in turn get their products from is very hard indeed to find out.The local aspect is one of the points that i grade my groceries on, the other being if it is organic and how much wrapping it has around it.
So the other day i walked into one of the food stores here with intention to buy some fresh produce. I came straight from work and was sufficiently tired. i saw a box of organic mandarins with only a paper box around them and some paper and thought great!when i got home, to my horror i realised that these very same mandarins had been flown here to canada from china. can you imagine the co2 emissions from their transport to me.
i am still trying to find local suppliers for my food.
listen to this:
some fish from BC gets fished here, then they get transported to korea to get packaged, then sent back here to be sold in the supermarkets as local fish from canada.Doesn't this sound like madness to you?

being in a country in the northern hemisphere in the winter if i want local products i will have to be satisfied with things like apples, potatoes and cabbage. Can i get all the nutrients i need with a local diet?How much am i willing to give up? How much can i do without and still feel content? I guess this is the question we all have to ask ourselves. If we are not willing to give up even a little we might lose it all, what risk am i willing to take,do i dare gamble, that the environmental scare about global warming isn't true after all. I don't know which i think is the scarier prospect...to live without tropical fruit and jet travels or to wake up one day on a destroyed planet.The first one is so directly affecting my life right now and putting restrictions on it, the other is so hard to grasp. The massive implications it would have. Crazy as it may sound,the globes health feels more impersonal. I guess it will not feel personal until that day when we run out of all our resources and war and famine take over.
I hope that it will not come to that.If i can take small steps to live more sustainable now, perhaps in the near future i can make larger strides once i get used to another way of living. I'd like to look at it, not so much as something i am giving up as something i am gaining.
Of course this past week has given me a lot of facts but i will not add them all here today. little by little i will let you in on how i go.
tomorrow university courses start for me so i will also have to make time for studies,work and relationships.
i will be back with further updates in the next few weeks.


me and ruth out skiing at sovereign lake