Thankful Sunday--August 16, 2014

I am thankful Ward is home.

As many of you know, Ward was gone for the last week or so on a backpacking trip in the back country of Yellowstone National Park. While I enjoyed my time alone, I am very happy he's back. Below are a few pictures from his trip where he saw mountains, meadows, waterfalls, geysers, lakes, and bubbling streams.

 

Food Waste Friday and True Food Confessions-Aug 15, 2014

It's time for Food Waste Friday, when the Frugalgirl encourages us to post pictures from the previous week of wasted food from our household. This accountability hopefully will help us to be more careful with our food and maybe save some money. Also, I am using this public forum to encourage us to eat out less which includes better meal planning. You can follow how we are doing in this endeavor by reading True Food Confessions. Occasionally, if our eating is going okay, I'll talk about some other food topic.

This Week's Food Waste

None

At least none that I could find with a quick look in the refrigerator. However, the proof will be in the pudding this weekend when the fridge gets a good cleaning.

This Week's True Food Confessions

 

I had this chopped salad for at least 3 different meals.

Ward has been away for the last week and a half and during that time, I really didn't worry too much about food. When I was hungry, I ate whatever I could find. However, when I thought about it, I realized that I hadn't done any cooking while he was gone--meaning that I didn't turn on the stove, oven, or any other cooking device. And that shouldn't come as a big surprise to anyone who reads here regularly, so I don't know why I was kind of surprised when I figured it out. It's not like I gravitate towards cooking on any kind of voluntary basis usually.

So what did I eat? I was lucky that I had several fresh vegetables on hand to use in various ways. I had sandwiches with tomatoes, cucumbers, peppers, lettuce, and onions and sometimes cheese. I had mustard and cheese sandwiches with onions. Sometimes I had meat with my lettuce, onions, peppers, and tomato sandwiches. To change things up, other times I had a bowl full of diced tomatoes, cucumbers, and onions with Italian dressing. Other times, I would add cottage cheese to this. I don't know if you're seeing a trend here, but except for my bowl of cereal at breakfast, I had onions at every meal. You see, Ward really doesn't like onions--especially the smell of raw ones. So while we do have onions occasionally, I try not to have them around too much. I took advantage of this time he was away, and ate onions to my heart's content. 

Now that Ward's back, I might turn on the stove again. Maybe.

Until next time....



 

A Second Look--August 13, 2014

Here are a few things I saw this week 

during a Second Look.

This flower is courtesy of the birds. They are randomly popping up in a lot of places.

This is the third kind of hosta that has started to bloom. The others are almost done.

The surprise lilies are right on schedule this year. Not much of surprise, I guess, but very welcome.

It was getting dark when I took a picture of this balloon flower.

The baby wrens have flown from the nest. It was about a month from the time the eggs were laid until they left.

This nest box has housed successful broods of bluebirds and wrens with sparrows fighting and losing for a chance to use it in between. The wren's nest is on top of the bluebirds nest.

I'm seeing more deer recently in my yard. This one was standing guard for two does and two fawns.

This baby bunny was laying very still in the grass. I don't know where the mother was.

Vampire Electricity

There is a lot of discussion these days about vampire electricity--electricity that is used by an appliance or electronic device when it's not in use but plugged in. These can be things like the digital display on your coffee pot or your phone charger. Most of these discussions can be quite alarming when you see the statistics they list of how much electricity these objects use both in terms of your budget and the carbon footprint. However, the articles usually give one grand number without going into the specifics of individual devices. So recently when I discovered that Miss Landers had a Kill-a-Watt gadget that measures electricity usage of things that plug in, I had to try it. I used it with a few things around the house to get a feel of how much electricity they were actually using. I measured each object for 24 hours and here are the results.

Item	KWH/24 hours	Cost/month	Cost/year
Toaster with display	0.02	$0.07	$0.87
Outlet only	0.03	$0.11	$1.30
Lamp-off, plugged in	0.03	$0.11	$1.30
Coffee pot with display	0.04	$0.14	$1.79
Computer Monitor	0.36	$1.30	$15.55
Laptop-large	0.47	$1.70	$20.30

As you can see, the lamp (turned off), the toaster with a digital display, and the Kill-a-Watt device itself all consumed negligible amounts of electricity--0.02-0.03 KWH/24 hours. I'm assuming that that may be in the margin of error of measurement, but I don't know for sure. The coffee pot display only consumed a little more with 0.04 KWH/24 hours. (None of the above items were in use during the measurement. They were just plugged in.) However, the monitor and laptop did use noticeable amounts of electricity although a lot less than I thought they would. I didn't measure only when they were turned off, but all of their use during a 24 hour period. The monitor is in use quite a bit, but does go into a power saving mode at night. The laptop is from Ward's work and is quite large and old. I'm sure that many newer ones and certainly tablets use less electricity than this one. However, that's what we had. Even with their heavier usage, the monitor and laptop consumed less that 1 KWH in a 24 hour period.

I then translated this usage into what it meant financially and that was a lot harder than I thought it would be. I assumed that I would just be able to read the charge for a KWH off of my electric bill, but it's not so simple. Besides that number, you also have to add in the additional costs that you pay every month. I ended up with $0.12/KWH as a reasonable estimate (only about half of that number is actual electric use). Rates vary across the country, so you may be paying more or less for your electricity. What I saw was that even if I leave all of these objects plugged in for a year, they're not going to break the bank.

I had a lot more measurements planned, but Theo took the device back with him one weekend. He wanted to measure various things in his apartment trying to see if he can cut his budget any more--mostly if there is a more efficient way to cool things. When I get it back, next up will be the TV. It's an Energy Star one and is supposed to only cost $6.00/year to operate (plugged in all of the time, 5 hours/day on.) I'm interested in that one in particular because it is supposed to be one of the bad offenders of drawing phantom power but the $6/year doesn't suggest that. We'll see.

Until next time...

More general reading and tips on cutting back on your electricity use:

http://electronics.howstuffworks.com/everyday-tech/vampire-power3.htm

http://www.usatoday.com/story/tech/columnist/komando/2012/10/26/komando-electric-bills/1649195/

https://www.energystar.gov/index.cfm?c=about.vampires

Thankful Sunday--August 10, 2014

I am thankful for my cats.

Annie and Lucy relaxing with me.

Ward is away for the weekend, but I'm not lonely because the cats are always ready to spend time with me. :)