chopping water and hauling wood

We belong to the order of monks that chop water and haul wood, ( instead of the other way around) and as my husband said this morning, thanks for loading the fire, we load the fire. 

Last weekend i visited such monks in their cabin along the river.  They said their 250 gallon  tank last 4 weeks. It looks the size of our hauling tank, which is 250 gallon. ( our indoor tank is 1500 liter, 420 gallon)  (it is all a bit weird i guess, gallons/liters, we use gallons when it comes to water, but we buy gasoline by the liter, whatever.)

Anyway i was surprised, Don and i get  the same amount of water at least every ten days, so we can do better then that right?

Now i am not going to give up on my bath, which i probably take once every ten days. (and i probably have one shower in that amount of days)

 Yet I can learn something from them when it comes to water use! and at the end of this post, i tell you how i did!

But first the chopping water part. Yes yesterday we had to chop. Not always:) and we do not actually use that term. We do haul wood , every morning, a tabagon full. and we do load the fire, several times a day. 

For our drinking water we go to Stony Creek. And ten days ago there was lots of open water. and as for my polar dip practice it is hard now to find open water, so i was going to dip in Stony Creek while we get water. Not so!

 Another monk was standing at the creek when we arrived.

Tt hasn't been that cold lately but the creek was  frozen over  quite solid, the regular hole  that is being kept open by all who 'chop' water here was 3 feet deep and in the bottom a film of ice and only half a foot of water underneath that. Normally we dip our blue jugs in at least 2 feet of water. Talking to the other monk, who brought blue jugs, a dipper, but no axe. Yes, we have an axe! He admired our axe,  i did not know it was special. Don says it has an ox-head blade, and came from Germany! i never knew.  So we, Junior and I take turns chopping, but really it is not going to work  we will be chopping for an hour to make the hole wide enough for the blue jug, and the water level being so low.Also filling the blue jug with your dipper is...a lot of work.

Junior walks a ways up creek, i follow, he finds another hole, which is much better, in no time we have a hole in the ice that we can dip our blue jugs into a foot of water, good enough. I fill the jugs ( half due to low water level ) and he makes full jugs, by pouring one in the other.

But this post is about doing dishes! now i do dishes twice a day (we cook 3 meals a day, so we do have quite a bit of dishes. even if we use our same bowl at times. for sure the same cup. I now use 5 liters of water total per day to do dishes, and with that i even have enough to clean the counters and stove top.

No dishwasher needed, which saves me in space and energy. In winter our hot water comes from the woodstove.  250 ways to do the dishes i like to say when it comes to different opinions about anything. So now i do dishes this way:  my dishes are pre-rinsed and wiped clean during the day, with handwashing water, vegetable rinse water, whatever water that ends up in the sink.  when times comes to do the dishes, i take two small bowls of hot water, one soapy, one not. I fill one sink with the wiped but still ditry dishes, the bowls sit on the counter. I dip my cloth in the hot soapy water and wash above the dirty dishes. Rinsing: then i pour some clear hot waterover the dish above the soapy bowl.  And really! clean dishes, with a little more vigilance are the result!