paige Herkemij

This week was community building week. My next door neighbor is an older man who has been pretty lonely. We have a pretty good relationship but I like to do nice things for him every once in a while so I decided to shovel his driveway and sidewalk when it snowed. He actually walks my dog sometimes when he is feeling extra lonely so I asked if he wanted to walk with me as well. We have some new people moving in so I also brought them some banana bread to introduce myself. Next week I have Wednesday off so I think I will attend the tutoring session in Multnomah village to help some highschooler which I am actually excited about.
I really enjoyed this weeks challenge as it gave me more perspective of all the nice people around me and how easy it is to make people a little happier.

Fixing leaky faucets is one of the tasks that we can easily put off until later. Good job on completing this action! How will you use the momentum from completing this action to increase your water efficiency in other ways?

This week I went around the house to find leaky faucets and things I could do to mitigate my water waste. One thing is that my shower head always drips after my showers for hours and hours. I tightened it up slightly and it no longer leaks. It funny how such little things can make a difference. Another thing that we haven been talking about was rainwater collection and why it could be banned in places. I did some more research and it seems that in dry areas they need the water to run to other counties and areas that rely on rainfall, so if everyone collected it there might be a problem. I decided to try and collect rain water/ water I might just dump down the drains. I kept some pasta water and collect some rain water this week and used it to water all of my house plants. Although the things I did this week will not make a big difference to anything, I think its keeping sustainability in my forefront and its helping me making different choices in my daily life.

I really looked into the meals that I commonly eat throughout the week, and they all consist of some sort of meat product. I wanted to try and move away from that this week, which was actually very easy since I had my wisdom teeth out and could not eat hard/chewy things. I instead made various bean, potatoes, and soft vegetables. I want to continue to eat less red meat and reach for fish and chicken to not only be more sustainable but also more healthy. I also researched growing beans in my garden this year (I didnt think I could on my deck garden) but it seems like I may be able to do not only green beans but also possibly black beans? This would be super cool as we eat tons of black beans and would be very cheap if we could grow them ourselves.