Almostgotit.com

Good news!  The utility company has given us a couple months off its billing cycle.  The poor thing still can’t decide how to bill the Almostgotits, as our low meter readings always make it suspicious (we heat with wood).   

The only thing is, we got our woodstove a couple years too early to qualify for Obama’s 30% tax credit for energy efficiency.    Ah well, we ALMOST got it!!

Saving money and saving the planet make wonderful bedfellows, so here’s six ways you can do both, just for today:

1. Hang your laundry out to dry.  If you don’t have a clothes line, buy one or just tie a rope between a couple of trees.  Clothes dryers are one of the biggest consumers of a home’s total energy use.  And yes, you can even hang your clothes up indoors!
2. Skip Starbucks for a day and find an Earth Day event to do instead  (or)
3. Do a fun Earth Day project with your kids at home.
4. Plant a vegetable garden!  Tomatoes and beans are the easiest of all, grow practically anywhere, and your own, home-grown vegetable plants are so gorgeous and satisfying.  Plus also, you’ll have great tasting food for much less than what you’d pay at the store!
5. Stock your freezer.  You’ll save money and energy by reducing your trips to the grocery store.  You’ll also reduce the temptation to eat out (more car trips, more money spent) because you’ll have things to eat at home.  And finally, freezers use less energy when they’re full, too. 
6. Plug your TV into a power bar.  Many appliances draw electricity even when they are turned off, so using a power bar can make a real difference in energy savings.

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Related posts:

5 Ways to work greener & cheaper 

11 Ways to be cheap in honor of Earth Day

Laundry and spring break and blogging: oh my!

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My “Writing Humor” class in Iowa bonded deeply with each other last summer.  There’s something about writing, laughing, and almost drowning together that will do that to people, I suppose.

One of my classmates was a banjo-playing lawyer named Sheila Simon, who published an article promoting the use of clotheslines in the Chicago Tribune not long after our stint together in Iowa City.  Here’s what Sheila and I have both discovered about hanging up our laundry:

1. Save a hundred dollars on your electric bill every month.
2. Keep your house cooler in the summer, and save on your AC bill, too.
3. Hanging laundry takes much less time than you think.
4. Line-dried laundry smells wonderful.
5. You paid for that yard and all that landscaping, so why not enjoy it?
6. Get to know your neighbors, too.
7. Help humidify your house in the winter.
8. Join virtually every other modern country on the planet.
9. Get your daily ration of Vitamin “D.”
10. You can still use your clothes dryer for emergencies.

A little more about humble Sheila.  We particularly enjoyed a story she shared about her father driving the entire family to MacDonalds, where he gravely recited their lengthy take-out order…  to a concrete traffic post. 

Eventually, we learned that Sheila’s family is from Illinois.  Later still, we learned that the take-out order had been delivered in the familiar, sonorous voice of a certain former Illinois legislator and presidential candidate. 

Yeah, THAT Simon.

Nor did Sheila tell us that she was a politician herself, having just completed a (sadly unsuccessful) run for Carbondale mayor last Spring – with a little help from another Illinois senator, last name of “Obama.”

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More about clotheslines:

• Project Laundry List: everything you need for air-drying (and for low-energy clothes washing, too)
• Vermont Clothes Line Company: more air-drying supplies and ideas
• Clothesline rule creates flap: Boston Globe article on states which are once again embracing “The Right to Dry.”
• Do clotheslines really lower property values? Discussion, with many good links
• A Line in the Yard: The Battle over the Right To Dry Outside New York Times article on the world-wide resurgence of clotheslines

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Cross posted at Blogher.com