Sean’s hair – I asked him if I could cut it. He said no. An emphatic no. Even when I offered to let him cut mine in exchange. Oh,well.

Our carpet – We borrowed a vacuum cleaner from our condo because it was getting pretty bad. We then started shopping around (on craigslist) for a vacuum to purchase after the spending freeze. Turns out, we found a totally free one, so there is one purchase we didn’t have to make!

1) A lot of people buy bottled water when they’re on the go – I know very few people (if anyone) who literally sit in their house and drinks bottled water instead of tap water. it’s more about convenience than about thinking bottled water is actually better than tap.

2) If there was a tax or whatever on bottled water, people would probably just switch (or switch back?) to juice/soda. That’s what I would do. I mean, I know I love being an environmental nazi and all, but I’m also really forgetful so the whole ‘bring water with you’ thing doesn’t work every time for me.

I’m not saying that the convenience factor or the substitution factor are insurmountable, I’d just like to see those things brought up more.

So that is why today, in honor of World Water Day, I just went down to the 7-11 and bought a caffeine free diet coke.

The van broke down and Sean decided that he had to fix it, so he is out buying car parts right now. Personally, I would have been fine with waiting till next month to fix it. We rarely use it during the week anyway, so it would have been just one weekend where we were stuck carless. But Sean was having none of it.

Aside from the car issue, things are going well, more or less. I really miss Thai food, and Sean’s hair is starting to look ridiculous. (Note: if you want to try the spending freeze at home, and you’re a man, think about getting a haircut before embarking on this thrifty journey.)

Also the carpet is getting pretty gross with our lack of a vacuum cleaner – but hey, sometimes when you’re an environmental superstar you just have to make sacrifices!

In a way it is kind of fun being forced to be creative about spending time with people. We sometimes go and get a coffee with a friend of ours who lives near us, and we were making plans to do this next week when I remembered that we can’t get coffee during the spending freeze. So instead we are going to have him over to our place for coffee and waffles, which I think will be really fun and actually more delicious than most coffee-shop food anyway.

The main things that I miss so far are:
1) having a normal pair of headphones – I accidentally slammed mine into the car door last weekend
2) having a vacuum – we determined that our Roomba is broken beyond repair. So we’re either borrowing a vacuum from someone or not vacuuming until April. (I wish I could actually pretend I was horrified at the thought of not vacuuming for a month, but really…. probably kind of a common occurrence for me.)

Now as much as I love OurJoules, I had to give this some very serious thought. Mike is a great person, but he is well-known for being, to put it very politely, a bit of a loose cannon. This man in college used to grab my cell phone during a party and send very explicit text messages to random people in my phone.

Yet for reasons I don’t understand, I am still friends with him and I thought it would be worth giving this new marketing technique a try.

So here is the deal: If Mike raises $500 between March 5 and April 5, he gets my facebook password. Oh yeah, I almost forgot… I also have to write “Mike is my hero” on my stomach and post that as my profile picture.

The good news is, if he doesn’t reach $500, O.J. keeps the money and runs!

As of right now, March 7, he has raised $20. I am feeling pretty relaxed about this, because $480 is a lot of money.

I’ll post updates here or you can also follow along on facebook.

As I read this, I was feeling sad because the Copenhagen talks were not accomplishing much, and I thought what if people who cared about the environment just stopped spending to send a message? I suppose all that would really happen would be that the government would just stimulate that much more, and the recipients of the cash transfer would spend more.

Anyway, that was the line of thinking that led me to the spending freeze. I mostly wanted to feel like I was doing (er, not doing) something tangible to help, rather than just sitting around worrying about the environment and saying what a shame it is that no one is willing to sacrifice.

And on a semi-related note, here is an awesome one-minute video about why growth is not always good:

Does it count as cheating on the spending freeze if I get a friend to go for me and report back on the event?

To celebrate the great environmental strategy of doing less, my husband and I are going to go on a one-month spending freeze starting on March 1st. Now this will be like a government spending freeze, that is to say, not much of a spending freeze at all. We’ll still pay our mortgage, which is the huge bulk of our expenditures, pay bills and buy groceries. But it will still be interesting to see how life goes for a month with zero discretionary spending.

According to my weekly budget, I should save about $175 per week with no eating out, travel, etc. And just what am I going to do with all this money after the spending freeze is over?

I could go to Disneyland, but that would defeat the purpose of the spending freeze. So instead, I’ll be using it to provide matching funds for OurJoules donations. This way my money will be spent on products that, over their lifetime, save/produce more energy than was used creating them.

So, wish me luck and stay tuned here for my non-spending adventures!