Pioneer Week

A new Pioneer Week Challenge hosted by Crunchy Chicken. I've been so busy I almost missed it!

Pioneer Living Rules (as reposted from Crunchy's blog)

1. Food: During Pioneer Week, you must make all your meals from scratch. This isn't really as hard as it sounds particularly if you start now. That's right, I'm letting you prepare meals ahead of time to freeze if you won't have time during the work week. But, anything prepared ahead of time must be made from scratch.

2. Energy usage: Keep your energy usage low by keeping the A/C (or heat if you live in the other hemisphere) low or off, use only one light in the house at a time (or at least turn off the lights when you are not using them) and line dry your clothes. Since you'll be doing a lot of cooking at home, try to coordinate when you are using the oven to take advantage of baking and/or roasting items at the same time. I don't expect you to unplug your fridge or freezer, so don't worry about that.

3. Conserve water: Since we don't all lug our water from the stream for home use, we'll have to do a few things to help conserve water. Besides taking shorter showers (5 minutes or less or take a military style shower) and flushing less often, you can create a great reminder about water usage by turning the water off on most of your sinks so when you go to use them nothing comes out.

4. Transportation: Walk or bike as much as possible. This will force you to support more local stores if you can't drive across town. If this isn't feasible, then drive or take public transportation. Most importantly, try to combine trips and if you really don't need to go out, stay home!

5. Rethink your entertainment: Instead of spending the week passively watching television or movies, try to engage more with the people you live with or neighbors within walking distance. Get the family back into playing games, music or just sitting around talking and telling stories. If you aren't in the mood for socializing try picking up that long lost craft hobby or start a new one.

6. Watch your wallet: Think of this as a Buy Nothing Week. Since you'll be pretty much eating at home all week, you don't really need to buy anything, now do you?