Doing our bit for the environment.

Since we have been living in Sydney we have barely used our car. We use it once a week to do the groceries and also when we pick up/ drop off our numerous visitors at the airport. Today the fuel light came on in the car on the way to do the groceries, and we both tried to remember the last time that we filled it up. My husband remembered doing so just after Christmas on our way to the New Years Bash, in country New South Wales. I remembered doing it in January, after dropping one of our mates at the airport. After discussing at length we realised that mid January was the last time we had filled up the car! No kidding!

We have done about 410 k's in two and a half months. Crazy huh! We catch public transport almost everywhere we go, and we walk... a lot.

We have become very kind to the environment since we came here. Very, very kind. We no longer have a garden, only a solitary Aloe Vera plant (Amy the Aloe), so we use a small portion of the water that we used to. We hardly use our car. We don't power heating or cooling, except for a solitary fan when the humidity becomes unbearable. In the evenings we use a singular lamp to light the living room, with its energy saving globe, and we rarely inhabit other rooms of the house at lengths that require a lot of light. We always turn off lights in rooms that we are not using, I have been guilty of turning lights off in rooms that I leave, even when my husband is still in them.

Last but not least, my husband is a recylcing nazi. He recycles everything you could possible recycle. He even rinses and leaves to dry each piece of recycling (apart from the newspaper) so that it is super sparkly and clean for the recycling company. Not that is will be like that for long after it is mixed with the rest of our building's recycling, non-rinsers the lot of them! (snorts in disgust) But you gotta give him credit for at least trying to smoothen the recycling process.

We participated last night in Earth Hour. I was so committed that I did the dishes to candle light! How good is that! I don't know how seriously a lot of people in our area took the whole Earth Hour concept, as there were people with heaps of lights on, heaps and heaps. Even the terrace house across from us that "supposedly" support the Greens. Oh, yes! I saw you people with your Greens poster out the front, and ALL OF YOUR LIGHTS ON!

I suppose the only thing that we are guilty of, is leaving our tv, dvd, sound system on standby, and my husbands computer. Also, occasionally I put my laptop to sleep, instead of turning it off and unplugging it. Not bad, though we are constantly trying to do better.