The secret of happiness

Now that’s a pompous title to a post. I doubt anyone can ever really claim to have found the one secret to happiness, however there was a nice article on happiness over at Mother Jones today. I particularly liked the “10 techniques to help you get happier”:

• Meet up with a friend that you haven’t seen for a while
• Watch a funny film or tv show
• Exercise 30 minutes three times a week
• Cut your tv viewing in half (but not the funny stuff?)
• Buy experiences not goods: go to a concert, movie, unusual place, or strange restaurant.
• Create novel challenges by starting a hobby, joining an organization, learning a skill
• Go for a 20 minute walk in the sun
• Spend 10 minutes listening to relaxing or uplifting music
• Stroke a dog (cat?)
• Stop watching and reading the news

It’s all to easy to focus solely on the physical things we have to do – the garden, the house, etc – and to miss out on thinking about the mental and emotional challenges that we face. And none of those have to cost a lot of money – perfect in this post-crash world.

How to make your own Dripping

OK, I’ll be up front, this is a little bit of a joke post, but I just bought the Victory Cookbook and there are lots of interesting food snippets in it to share. It’s a compilation of three of Marguerite Patten’s during and post-war cookbooks, and so is great for frugal, ration-based cooking. One of the items that caught my eye was called “Save that Fat”:

Collect all the oddments of fat that you can from frying pans, baking tins and stews. Melt and strain them all into a big bowl and wash them by pouring on some boiling water (you will need about a pint of water for 2 oz of fat). When the liquid solidifies, lift off the solid fat and scrape the sediment off the bottom; it is now quite suitable for frying or roasting. Wise housewives will take this a step further. They will heat the at up again until it stops bubbling. This means that it is quite free from moisture and will keep literally indefinitely. It can be saved for anything, even cake making.

Not sure about you, but that was new to me! Now I can’t cook a pan of sausages without feeling I shouldn’t be throwing the fat away – surely this is some of the ultimate recycling.  Maybe one of these days I’ll become a “Wise Eco-Housewife” and try it. I might leave a note explaining to the Paramedics what I’ve done though.

How much energy does your car use?

As part of our Energy Descent Plan we’re trying to progressively reduce our energy consumption – fuel for the car, electricity and gas in the house. This’ll save us significant money but also will reduce our carbon footprint and dependance on Fossil Fuels.

The first thing is to work out how much energy we’re using, and to that end we’ve started measuring it monthly. We’ve just finished the second month of monitoring our car usage, although they have been two crazy months (due to moving in to the eco-house) so the results may not be typical of our normal lifestyle. We’re converting all our energy use to kWh/day so that we can compare fuel/electricity/gas on an equal basis:

Month	Miles	MPG	Litres Used	kWh	kWh/day
June	429	46	42.4	454	15.12
July	423	47.2	40.74	436	14.06

So we’ve already seen a significant drop in our daily energy consumption from the car

I’d have to say that is a bit of a fluke – we haven’t tried particularly hard to reduce our consumption yet. It’ll be interesting to see how our consumption changes as we settle into our new routines here.

As it’s the first of the month I’ve just taken the first Gas and Electric readings in the eco-house so we can work out our standard consumption for those next month too – it’ll be interesting reading and will give us a base to measure our changes.

One of the first learning  points from this is that if we had a plug-in electric car we’d have to have at least 15 kWp of solar panels installed – that is a LOT of solar panels. It makes you realise how big an impact the car has on our energy consumption.

Our Rainwater Harvesting system (v1)

Current Capacity: about 2 litres, I think we can do better!

No, seriously, this is the only thing collecting water from the house at the moment. A single plastic jug under one of the downpipes. It’s a little below the 6,000l capacity I’ve been planning in my thoughts on Rainwater Tanks.

(The rocks were kindly donated by the littlies, who are currently filling it full of anything in the garden that sinks !)

OK, we’re in!

Finally, after several months of back-n-forth we are in our new house – expect some renewed action as we start to make some progress on all these wonderfull things we’ve been talking about – and the first figures for our Energy Descent plan are due at the end of the month.

Interesting Post-Peak article

http://www.bohemian.com/bohemian/06.17.09/feature-0924.html

An interesting article that canvasses a wide range of post-peak views, from Transition USA to Life after the Oil Crash. Amidst all the gloom this quot amde me laugh:

These people must reprioritize their value systems now and quit “waddling through Wal-Mart.”

I can see myself in that mirror – it’s time to really question what we’re buying, and why, and how we’d survive without it.

And then start doing without it now.

Aquaponics Update

Sorry, haven’t been posting much recently – have been sorting out our new house . . . due to move in in a few weeks – working hard – and I’ve been planning out our Aquaponics system.

It’s one of the first things that’s going up at our new house so I’ve been busily over-planning every detail. It’s looking pretty impressive now – go and have a look at the latest version of our Aquaponic Polytunnel over at Garden Aquaponics.

Understanding Peak Oil video presentation

Just another quickie – a really good video from Post-Peak Living. This is a great introduction to peak oil, so if you know someone who doesn’t yet understand the issues, send them this link. It’s U.S. based, but is still good – I liked a couple of the points particularly:

People lived well before oil, and people can live well after it.

Life is going to get very local, very quickly.

Worth remembering!

The Guide to Post Peak Living

Just found this great resource over at Post Peak Living- “The Guide to Post Peak Living” – it’s a well-organised, comprehensive guide to preparing for life after the peak, including food storage, water, skills to learn and many others. Well worth a good read.

ExxonMobil: U.S. Gasoline Consumption has peaked

In an interesting article on the Obama approach to Peak Oil, The Huffington Post reports that ExxonMobil have declared that U.S. Gasoline Consumption peaked in 2008.

Even the oil patch’s biggest cheerleaders, ExxonMobil, who earlier helped frighten a public and a market to $147/bbl oil, now finds itself obligated to acknowledge that that U.S. consumption of gasoline has peaked.

 The article goes on to propose that remaining Oil and Gas reserves be taken into a National Oil Trust – essentially nationalising the U.S. Oil industry. Very interesting.