Hi Hilary here, feeling much better (in spite of the title of the blog). Many thanks to all who wrote or posted such encouraging messages in response to my 'Negative thoughts' post. It was certainly a turnaround for the Cadman-Gall household for Bruce to be posting positive thoughts, I'm usually the cheery one, whereas he frequently behaves as though he's auditioning for 'Grumpy old men'.
We've had a frustrating week in terms of our carbon emissions. First, Bruce and I managed to double our emissions on a trip to the Southern Highlands last Saturday. We went up to visit an elderly relative, but that morning the owner of the B&B we had booked rang and persuaded us that we'd best take Bruce's gas-guzzling 4-wheel drive rather than my little Echo, because they were experiencing such wild weather. In the end we encountered nothing more drastic than heavy rain, and would have been fine in the Echo!
On Sunday afternoon I decided to water one of the circles in my permaculture garden. I drip-irrigate the garden using a tank of water that's filled from our dam via a petrol-driven pump. When the tank is full (as it was), it takes about 2 hours of watering to get about 2 litres flowing from each dripper, which is all the plants need. Three days later Bruce went out to feed the chooks and found he was standing in a bog - the whole tank had been emptied onto the one circle, wasting water and petrol, and not doing much good to the plants.
Finally, Bruce and I heat our studies using flat radiant heaters (advertised as 'a hot water bottle for the office'). They use very little energy, because they just heat the person not the room. However, the downside of this is that it's really easy to forget to turn them off. Last week Bruce left one running all night, so it was busy radiating heat while he slept. All of this has been increasing our carbon footprint unnecessarily, which is most frustrating.
On a positive note, a colleague and I had to go up to Sydney this week for work. Rather than both flying there and back, I went up by bus and my colleague joined me the next day, driving up in the company Echo. This meant that once our work was finished we could drive back together. So we not only saved the company some money but also generated substantially less greenhouse gas emissions. It certainly created some discussion with our clients, none of whom had considered the bus as an option for travelling between Sydney and Canberra.
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