Not Calling You a Liar

Okay so I haven’t posted a song in FOREVER!  Ever since my favorite imeem.com merged with MySpace I haven’t been able to find a source to use to post on here. But since then I have been listening to new songs on a personal basis and such on youtube.com and thought Why in the heck haven’t I’ve been using YouTube for my blog?!

So now you’ll start seeing some new songs and music since I now have another source to put music on my blog with.

Now I’m watching tv when the commercials come on. I start to zone out when I hear this song. I’m instantly in love. There is a new show coming out and in the commercial they played this song and since I’m sitting right on the computer, I head right to Google.com.

The beginning part is my absolute favorite!! Hope you enjoy this song as much as I did!

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Green of the Week: Out with the old

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Green is VERY sexy

So yesterday I’m going through my stats on my website and I see that my blog about Rachel McAdams and her sexiness, aka Green is Sexy.org website gets a lot of hits.  I remember blogging about this about a year ago and I decided to go back and read it again.  (it was a great blog btw) ;)

So I then click on GreenIsSexy.org and see that the site is still going strong.  I start reading through the blogs and tips and see that it has a lot of great ideas that I can incorporate.  I got to thinking how I would do this without being extremely hard on me.  I decided once a week I’m going to incorporate ways to be green and/or self sufficient.  I’ll be blogging about most of these projects and will be titling them as “Green of the Week:”

Another website that I’ll be getting tips and ideas from is going to be SelfSufficient.com so make sure you check out those websites and see what you can do that is green.  Because remember Green is VERY sexy!

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Rain Harvesting – Why you need to do it?

This is an article about rain harvesting and why I feel it’s so very important to do. I guess there are several types of rain harvesting, I will be discussing the rain water that comes off of rooftops, also known as roofwater harvesting.  I feel this is the perfect time to talk about today as I collected 150 gallons of water in just about an hour of yesterdays 9 hour rain.  Its a wonderful tool!

Why?

Areas of water shortage
First I feel I need to explain why I do it. This is the main reason why I even considered rain harvesting. We run off of a well as our source of water, but its not the greatest well. Usually during the summer we run so low that we can’t even do our laundry let alone water my garden.

This was a serious issue as I love gardening and couldn’t bring myself to NOT have a garden because we didn’t have water to water it. So what did I do? I started conserving water in totes around my rooftop. I started to see how much rain I was able to collect with just a 15 min rain. So I did some research and found that my idea of collecting roof water was nothing new.

Collecting roof water is perfect for areas that have water shortages. The amount of rain you can collect is amazing and if you have the right system you would always have rain water collected.

Now I live outside of town, as for in town there are water restrictions. People would benefit collecting water for these reasons too. Depending on the time of year the towns restrictions include not being able to wash your car, or grow grass, or water on certain days or certain times. It literally is you can wash on odd days if you house number is odd but only before 8:00am. I don’t know about you but my garden doesn’t abide by those rules very well, when it’s thirsty, it lets you know.

To ensure a backup for other water supplies

Especially if you have a large garden or farm area, you know that the demands of water is extreme.  This puts quite a load on the watering system you may be on.  I have a friend that has a farm the size of a football field and they take all the water from the well.  Now I know this well produces VERY well and they are lucky they have it so good.  But what happens if the pump breaks?  Or what happens if this is the year the well slows down?  What about a leak?  All these reasons are great reasons to have a back up supply of water conserved.

Last year another part of our town all of a sudden lost their water supply.  They were out of water for two weeks.  It was a huge ordeal for the water company to ship water to them and even then, it wasn’t near enough water to please people.  This was a trying time for them, however if they had a back up tank they could had burdened the lack of water supply easily.
It’s Green

With all the talk about giving back to the world, how much greener can you get?  You are being self sufficient, storing the water that comes from the skies, temporarily just to put it back in the ground as you use it.  Its a beautiful circle that I feel proud I’m a part of.


Benefits

Mother Natures Fertilizer

ANYONE that has a garden can tell you that rain water is the best way to water your garden.  I don’t care how much you water with well or city water the rain water is the instant fertilizer a garden needs.  Don’t believe me?  Go out to the desert or the mountains after a weeks worth of rain and see how much has truly blossomed and grew.  A month or so ago we had a weeks worth of rain and my garden pretty much doubled in size, they grew more in that week then they had in the month before.  It was beautiful to see mother nature at work.

Saves Money

Now it depends on where you live of course but a bill from a water company can be outrageous if you are watering a football field of plants.  You are at the mercy of deciding if you want to continue to pay to have your garden?  Is it worth the costs when you factor the water bills in?

Cleaner water not treated with chemicals

Going back to mother natures fertilizer you get cleaner fresher water.  You don’t have the chemicals or chlorine that can potentially be absorbed by your plants and in turn eaten by you.  This is water at its purest form.  Now along these lines I don’t recommend drinking the water without treating it, as you are collecting it off of a rooftop and as it comes down it can collect bacteria.  BUT there are ways to treat the water to use as drinking and of course its your opinion but to me it is a much better quality then the water from the city.  But your plants don’t care if the water has dust particles in it, it doesn’t even care if mosquitoes have laid larvae in it, the dirt and root systems filter all these out.

How Much Rain
Generally speaking 1″ of rain x 1 sq. ft. = 0.623 gallons. So if you have 100sq feet ( a 10×10 roof) one inch of rain would gather about 62 gallons of water. If you have 1000 square feet (100×100 roof) and get an inch of rain you’ll get 623 gallons of water. So what if its only a quarter inch? Then you would get 155 gallons of water. See how much water you can collect just from one small rain? And what if you get an hours worth of rain? You can only imagine how much rain you’ll get then.



How To

Now this depends entirely on the amount of garden and the amount of water you want to collect. I started out with rain barrels. (and I still have yet to upgrade) But if you plan on watering your garden solely with rain water and if you have a good size garden I would recommend skipping over the rain barrels period. Start with a water tank. I personally would start in the 500 gallon tank range. I plan on upgrading soon to a 500 gallon tank or hopefully a 1000 gallon tank.

Right now though I have 3 – 65 gallon tanks and it lasts me about a week. So I have to count on it raining a week from after I started watering. It sometimes works out great but then sometimes I’m having to ship water because we didn’t get a rain soon enough. Plus I have to be out there manually switching to the next rain barrel after the first and second one is full. If you have one tank that the water goes into then much less trouble and work.

So basically you need:

A roof
Gutters around this roof
A storage tank
A pump

There is a handy little gutter diverted that I picked up at a yard sale that is PERFECT for harvesting rain. I’ve seen them at home improvement stores. So I would highly recommend that as well.

You set up an area, out of the way if possible but of course next to a down spout of the gutter. You will probably need to cut the gutter at a certain height to attach the gutter diverted to and just direct it to your storage tank. Remember also that a gallon of water roughly weighs about 8 lbs so a 500 gallon tank full is going to weigh 4000 lbs. I would make sure that this tank is securely on the ground, on a stable flat ground.

Last but not least you need to pick up a pump. We picked one up at the local home improvement store for 50 bucks. We find this works perfectly for keep the flow steady but not too much. Using they siphoning method is a pain in the neck and then the tank has to be elevated which can cause a hazard at a heavy weight.

Depending on where you purchase these products it can cost anywhere from a few hundred dollars to a few thousand. Personally I try to stay in the few hundred dollar range and use what I have around me. The last thing I have to do is purchase a larger water tank and have found some steals on craigslist. Wherever you find the products though you will definitely appreciate and benefit from harvesting roofwater.

One last note:  Be careful of open container standing water as this can produce mosquitoes and that’s just no fun and can potentially spread diseases.  There are products out on the market that can be added to the water but the best (and cheapest) way I found is adding vegetable oil to the water and mixing it in.  The oil floats to the top and creates a barrier keeping the bugs from laying eggs and if there are eggs in there, the larvae dies since it can’t survive with a layer of oil on the top.

Some helpful links I’ve found during my research online:
http://www.watercache.com/education/rainwater/
http://therainwaterstore.net/index.php// (personally I’ve never bought anything from here but thought I’d include it)

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Coffee on Saturday 8-21-10


This is a blog of random thoughts and ideas. This is what we would be talking about, if you were right here with me having coffee on this Saturday. So pull up a seat and enjoy your cup of coffee with me.

Fall Cleaning?

Well I don’t know quite what it would be called but I am ready to take everything out of my house and dump it!

A true fact: The more crap you have the more crap you have to keep clean.

Another true fact: The more crap you have the harder it is to keep your crap clean.

Last true fact: When you’re never home you can never clean your crap.

Those facts are what keep going through my mind over and over again. Which is exactly why I’m ready to take everything in my house and dump it or donate it to the thrift store. From clothes to dishes to stuff to crap!

I’ve been in lots of peoples houses and think, “wow, how do they keep it so clean when they are always gone and working, even with kids!” and the answer is, they don’t have a lot of crap. They have simplified their lives so much that they don’t need to have all that… crap.

So that got me thinking, there are a ton of stuff that I have that I haven’t used in years! So why am I keeping it? I tend to be a “pack rat” kind of person. Because the minute I throw away something, thats when I need it. But no more thinking like that! I am done with all my stuff.

So as soon as my honey wakes up this morning he is in for a surprise. We shall be doing some cleaning today. Want to come by and help?

Distractions
Trying to write a blog and surf the net is hard! I start writing the blog and think, oh well I should go check this post to see if anyone responded, then I get carried away again. I wish I could write a blog with my mouth. (that would be interesting)

Dust
OMG. We live on a dirt road and I know that dust is a fact of life. Which was just fine. Not to bad, I could keep up on it. And then we got a dog. A BIG dog. That loves to track in dust. Now dust is a ridiculous chore that never ever goes away. Seriously, to keep everything clean I would have to dust REALLY good (like washing decorations off and such) every week, and do the lighter dusting every day.

Just not enough time of the day to dust. So instead I just watch the dust gather. And I stare at it thinking, wow I should really dust that but of course something happens to distract me. (I blame it on the Gemini in me) (I had to get one of those in)

So as I’m sitting here typing my blog, I’m looking at a couple things that need to be dusted….. Oh wait, you know what, I think I have to run to the store instead. :P

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