I wanted to talk about this topic “Are blogs too per­sonal?” for the last cou­ple of weeks and even more so after one of my clos­est friends closed down her blog due to the off-line world find­ing it. After going through my blog roll recently more and more blogs are becom­ing blogs writ­ten about a cer­tain topic, for exam­ple, mine nor­mally is being fru­gal and green which I think is a great idea and I love to see dif­fer­ent views but then again I like to see some per­sonal con­tent as well, what’s hap­pen­ing in their lives.

I started think­ing whether or not my blog is too per­sonal and I dis­cussed with my hus­band and my best friend yes­ter­day, I don’t really write like I use to about the going ons in my life well not the really per­sonal ones because unless it is out in the open then why put it on the inter­net where any­one can see it at the end of the day I know my blog is on the inter­net so it is pretty much pub­lic and yes I do go by a nick­name (same one for the last 10 years) but I now have twit­ter and a lot of my off-line friends have twit­ter now so they have access to my blog, plus if you know my nick­name you could pretty much just find me straight away.

I realised also I don’t think I have ever refer to my hus­band by his name in the whole three years of being with him which is pretty impres­sive as I for­get quite a bit that I haven’t unless I have added you to face­book then you know my own name and his name, he has read my blog now and then but isn’t really that inter­ested in it unless I am talk­ing about the money I have made from it   My par­ents know of my blog, I don’t think they really read it.

I really respect the ladies like Jenn and Amanda who don’t hide any­thing and for that rea­son read­ing their blogs makes me feel like I know them better.

Any­way I am ram­bling and I have to eat before my dri­ving les­son, I am curi­ous where do you draw the line on your own blogs?

I wrote this last week but totally for­got to post it so I will added this and a quick update on this week:

Not hav­ing the best week at the moment, it started off okay went to uni­ver­sity on Mon­day which this stu­pid cold but my mother was late pick­ing me up so instead of get­ting home at 4.30pm did not get home till 6pm. Tues­day I did not go in due to the fact I am run­ning out of money and half my lec­tures were can­celled, but I did man­age to get the web­site I have been work­ing on for the last 6 weeks to be com­pleted, it is a to-do list web appli­ca­tion made up of css, php, javascript, jquery and sql, I am really pleased with it and I hope I get a good mark

Wednes­day was a waste of a day had to go in for this stu­pid career devel­op­ment for a cou­ple of hours which was a com­plete waste of time and I do not know why we had to go, after this there was a protest at uni­ver­sity, 50 stu­dents had got into the man­age­ment build­ing protest­ing the cuts in infor­mat­ics, about 6 police vans, sev­eral police cars and a police dog later.  In the end 2 stu­dents were arrested and 6 stu­dents were sus­pended

Thurs­day to Sun­day my hus­band was off so the bath­room was being done and now it is nearly done, apart it from it need­ing to be painted.

I had a really embar­rass­ing time on the train this morn­ing, I was on the train, my stop was com­ing up so I stood up wait­ing for it to stop but it never came, the train went speed­ing pass and I ended up at a totally dif­fer­ent sta­tion 20 min­utes later. Lucky for me I already know that area quite well so I man­aged to get back to the uni­ver­sity stop.

I am sorry I haven’t posted other than green related top­ics, uni­ver­sity is so busy and they already have me choos­ing next years mod­ules.  It is a lit­tle too much right now, feel like I am going to explode with all these exams, group work, dri­ving, house and baby related items.

Saw an amaz­ing film this week, Valen­tines Day, so cute!

Hav­ing some issues with my cur­rent theme hope­fully get it back up again by today.…

I have fixed it now, hur­rah, unsure why it went ran­dom on me for a day, I think it had some­thing to do with my stylesheet… I am going to work on a new theme in sum­mer as there is too much uni­ver­sity work going on right now, plus my exam timetable is up and it horrible!!

Long await post about being green in the kitchen, this one is more than likely going to be a long one as I can think of so many way of being green in the kitchen.

Dishwasher

Now I know a lot of peo­ple worry that using a dish­washer is worse than hand wash­ing but I have researched this in depth, and it turns out that no using a dish­washer on a ECO wash is cheaper and uses less elec­tric­ity than hand wash­ing.  But I would like to men­tion please remem­ber to turn the plug off while not using it as this is use wast­ing energy that doesn’t need to be wasted.

I found this arti­cle which works out how much energy and water you will use in a dish­washer vs hand washing

Water use, energy use, and car­bon foot­print
There are three big fac­tors we’ll con­sider: water use, energy use (for heat­ing the water, largely), and the car­bon foot­print that results — we’ll save things like soap and dish­washer cook­ing for another post. And, of course, fol­low­ing energy-saving tips like run­ning the “light” cycle and turn­ing off the “heated dry­ing” option will change the way the num­bers work.

Built-in dish­washer effi­ciency
The aver­age dish­washer uses 6 gal­lons of water per cycle; the aver­age Energy Star-rated dish­washer uses 4 gal­lons per cycle, and their energy use ranges from 1.59 kWh per load down to 0.87 kWh per load. Using the Depart­ment of Energy’s car­bon diox­ide emis­sions num­bers of 1.34 pounds of CO2 per kWh, that’s 1.16 to 2.13 pounds of car­bon diox­ide emit­ted per load, to go along with 4 gal­lons of water.

Energy Star assumes each load in a “stan­dard” dish­washer (usu­ally 24 inches in size) has “a capac­ity greater than or equal to eight place set­tings and six serv­ing pieces,” so we’ll go with that when con­sid­er­ing how many dishes need to be washed by hand.

Can hand wash­ing be as effi­cient as dish­wash­ing?
The short answer: maybe. First, let’s look at water usage alone. The aver­age faucet flows at 2 gal­lons per minute, so if you can suc­cess­fully wash and rinse eight place set­tings — plates, bowls, forks, knives, spoons, glasses, etc. — and those six serv­ing dishes that your dish­washer can han­dle with­out run­ning the faucet for more than 2 total min­utes, then, you might be bet­ter off hand-washing. Assum­ing you’re wash­ing 54 pieces of dish­ware (that’s 48 pieces of dish­ware — 6 pieces per set­ting — and 6 serv­ing dishes), you’ve got about 4.4 sec­onds of wide-open tap water per piece, or about 9.5 ounces of water to wash and rinse each dish.

Impacts of heat­ing the water
Let’s assume you use warm water for both wash­ing and rins­ing — half hot water and half cold water. Heat­ing 2 gal­lons of water with a gas hot water heater (from about 60 degrees as it enters your house to, say, 120 degrees, set by the ther­mo­stat on your hot water heater) takes about 960 BTUs, or about 0.9% of one therm (100,000 BTUs), assum­ing 100 per­cent effi­ciency.
Gas stor­age tank water heaters
Gas water-heaters are usu­ally more like 65 per­cent effi­cient, so it really takes 1477 BTUs, or about 1.5 per­cent of a therm, to heat that water. One therm emits 11.7 pounds of CO2, accord­ing to the EPA (pdf), so heat­ing the water with gas for each 2-gallon load emits about .17 pounds of car­bon dioxide.

On-demand (or tan­k­less) water heaters are closer to 80 per­cent effi­cient, which changes the num­bers a bit; it works out to about 1200 BTUs, or about .14 pounds of car­bon diox­ide.
Elec­tric stor­age tank water heaters
The story is a bit dif­fer­ent when con­sid­er­ing an elec­tric water heater; while most elec­tric water heaters use between 86 and 93 per­cent of their energy for heat (com­pared to between 60 and 65 per­cent for gas), elec­tric heaters aren’t as effi­cient at heat­ing water. It still takes 960 BTUs to heat that much water; it just takes about .28 kWh (since, accord­ing to the EIA, 1 kWh equals 3412 BTUs) to heat 2 gal­lons of water at 100 per­cent effi­ciency, or about .30 kWh at 93 per­cent effi­ciency. Each kWh emits 1.715 pounds of CO2, on aver­age (thank you, EPA), so heat­ing water with elec­tric­ity for each 2-gallon load emits about .51 pounds of CO2.
Built in dish­washer vs. hand-washing: And the win­ner is…
These num­bers indi­cate that it’s pos­si­ble to be more effi­cient when hand-washing, but it’s pretty tough. Can you suc­cess­fully wash and rinse a soiled din­ner plate in just over a cup of water? If you can keep the water use low, equal to an effi­cient machine, you’ll require less energy, but doing an entire load of dishes in 4 gal­lons of water is roughly equiv­a­lent to doing them all in the same amount of water you use in 96 sec­onds of show­er­ing (using a show­er­head that emits 2.5 gal­lons per minute).

So, as long as you don’t often run your dish­washer when it’s only half full of dirty dishes, or unless you are very miserly with your water use (or have an old, inef­fi­cient dish­washer), the auto­matic dish­washer is likely to be more effi­cient. That is to say, it’s pos­si­ble to use less water and energy by hand wash­ing your dishes, but it’s not easy. Of course, if you do it just right, it might just be a wash.

More infor­ma­tion at treehugger.com

Clean­ing Products

Now I have men­tioned this before down in the being green in the bath­room but clean­ing prod­uct are an large impact on the world, using more organic, more nat­ural prod­ucts is always best, the only issue that gets me if the price, I under­stand why that have to be more expen­sive because it is not just chem­i­cals like the cheaper brands but I wish they would bring it down a lit­tle bit as not all of us have money to burn.

Pet related

This one is a tough due to the fact it has taken me for­ever to find cat lit­ter than is not going to kill the envi­ron­ment, I have tried loads of cat lit­ter for one I hate the clump­ing ones as they take for­ever to clean (which wastes water, clean­ing prod­uct and not to men­tion it smells), I have gone for a one at the  moment which is lit­tle tubs of old wood shav­ings, the think I like about it the most is the fact when the cat goes to the bath­room the lit­tle tubs dis­ap­pear a leave what I can only describe as saw­dust (kind of like a ham­ster cage lin­ing) but it does have a nice pine smell and lasts longer so you don’t use as much sav­ing money and sav­ing time.  If you can go for an eco cat lit­ter it is nicer for the cat and for your noses.

Cat food tins wash out, I know it is a huge pain but if you have one cat or three like myself you will end up going through at least one tin a day, with mine it is two tins a day (I swear Onion steals every­one else’s food but I can’t prove it!), I did try putting these through the dish­washer but every­thing smelled of cat food so now I have to hand wash them with bleach as well as wash­ing up liq­uid, please use a dif­fer­ent wash cloth as it is not nice otherwise.

Also check out Eco-Me Cat Kit Nat­ural Tool Kit, you can make your own cat lit­ter and flea spray, also cat treats, I might have to give this one ago.

Recy­cling

I am huge on recy­cling, lucky for me my coun­cil pro­vide me lit­tle pink bags which I put out every week, what I have found is a lot of items can be recy­cled, in my house­hold we have one bin for rub­bish and one for recy­cling, my mother is even bet­ter and has a bin for veg­etable ends, egg shells and other organic food mat­ter which she puts in her com­post down at the end of the gar­den.  I haven’t got a huge gar­den more like the size of postage stamp but I could fit a small one in my mother informs me.

Hav­ing two bins really saves me the headache of hav­ing to keep the bag some­where, since recy­cling (I even have my hus­band doing it who told me it was a waste of time) we hardly but out much black bin bag rubbish.

Grow­ing your own Vegetables

See I tried this last year but only man­aged to grow a cucum­ber and some herbs, my mother on the other hand split half her gar­den into her veg­etable and fruit patch and grew so much, loads of leeks (I love leeks), but this year I am going to grown my own car­rots, pota­toes and leeks plus the nor­mal amount of herbs, I’ll have to update you about this later in the year.  I think grow­ing your own veg­eta­bles doesn’t take a lot of work but it is so pleas­ing to see them grow even for me grow­ing any­thing makes me happy and I suck at gar­den­ing in gen­eral, I get the hus­band to do it for me.  Even if you don’t’ have a gar­den just a small bal­cony you could grow new pota­toes in big pots.

Gen­eral Tips

• Don’t over fill the kettle
• Don’t waste food
• Bulk cook where you can
• Make your own lunches
• Re-use items where you can
• Turn the lights off when you leave a room
• Re-use pack­ag­ing
• Use energy efficient
• Only wash full loads this goes for the wash­ing machine, dish­washer and the tum­ble dyer

Next week I am cov­er­ing female prod­ucts and make-up   Sorry I haven’t been around so much uni has me all tied up.

My hus­band and I have been debat­ing whether or not we should get our eyes tested again, a cou­ple of years ago I did have an eye test but then said after wear­ing my eye­glasses for a cou­ple of years my eye would repair them­selves, so for the last year my eyes have been fine but using com­put­ers every day due to uni­ver­sity and my own per­sonal love of them I think is caus­ing my eye sight to get worse.

I would really like to get my eyes tested again but it is so expen­sive the test itself does not cost the earth but the glasses them­selves do! My mother recently got glasses and it cost her $400 and I could really not believe it, after research and read­ing Cheap eye­glasses are a real­ity. Check out Eric’s review of Zenni Opti­cal arti­cle and I believe that I should be able to get qual­ity glasses for a low cost accord­ing to this arti­cle you can get glasses for $8 a pair! That is amaz­ing!! Plus ship­ping is only $4.95 no mat­ter how many glasses you order.

I think buy­ing glasses on-line might be the next way to go about it, as long as you have a pre­scrip­tion you can get your glasses any­where, def­i­nitely shop around.

Now I love my hus­band dearly, he is my best friend but one of the annoy­ing habits he has is that he is never on time for any­thing, I’ll tell him I have to be at the train sta­tion in 20 min­utes, he tells me we have loads of time until it gets to 10 min­utes until my train is about to leave and then he will panic telling me has not got every­thing and once we set off he always with­out fail tells me he has for­got­ten some­thing! I really need to get him a watch, maybe that would make sure we are on time, I could buy him Casio G Shock watch but even then I doubt he would be on time.

Oh the joys of insur­ance, this really annoys me just because every year unless you look around for dif­fer­ent quotes your cur­rent insur­ance com­pany puts up the price by hun­dreds of pounds, and this annoys me more because I have never claimed on the insur­ance, lucky for me get­ting a Okla­homa insur­ance quote is really easy to do these days. I man­aged to find one that only costs us £13 a month also there are reviews about the cur­rent insur­ance agen­cies out there which always helps

So my word of advice is to def­i­nitely look around and see what other deals you can get out there, you never really know until you try, say­ing that I should go and look into our gas and elec­tric as it is way to high!

Just like for car insur­ance there are web­sites out there that help you find the cheap­est and most cost effec­tive life insur­ance. It is easy and sim­ple to use and it only takes a few min­utes to get a quote, you should have life insur­ance just in case some­thing hap­pens to you and what will your part­ner do if they have to pay the bills on their own, I would say you should have it!

When I went to Florida about five years ago now (whoa that makes me feel old) to visit two friends out there, we drove from Ohio down to Florida and went Dis­ney world which to me was like being in some weird world but the gift shops were lovely!

Now when we brought out tick­ets for Dis­ney world, we stayed in some rub­bish motel but I wish we had stayed in one of the Dis­ney World hotels. When I went the weather was in mid sum­mer and it rained all the time (hot rain, very strange) and we had to buy these big plas­tic bin bags to wear!

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