Water saving measures actually save water!

In late June, I posted about living in a water shortage and about the new measures we were taking to save water. I have to admit that for some reason I never think what I do actually makes a difference. I don't actually USE electricity when I leave the light on in the bathroom, do I? The fridge doesn't actually get dirty if I don't clean it, right? (Er, don't answer those questions.)

But since we started taking some simple measures to save water, this happened to our water bill:

Now take into consideration the fact that Hebrew goes from right to left, and look at that bill again.

That's right.. we went from using more than 20 cubic meters of water every two months (for just two people-- yikes) to using, recently, just 10. We literally used half the water in September-October this year compared to September-October last year. I'd call that results!

These are some of the things we started to do differently... I'm going to be really honest here, so I'm sorry if this means you no longer want to sit next to me on a bus or set foot in our apartment. :)

1. We don't flush our toilet every time. You know, "if it's yellow, let it mellow, if it's brown, wash it down." When I do flush, I always use the little "half-tank" lever rather than the big "full-tank" lever. (Israeli toilets have two different flush settings.) Yes, letting yellow mellow is a little gross, but on the plus side it has made me much better about remembering to put the toilet lid down. (Putting the top lid down was a really hard skill for me to learn. I have much more appreciation for my husband's consistency in putting the seat down now!) This alone saves a TON of water, especially because I work from home and have a notoriously small bladder. Isn't it insane how much treated, cleaned, potable drinking water we just flush down every day? We started being strict about not flushing in the spring of this year, and you can see the difference in our water usage. In our next apartment, we're going to hook up our toilet so that we can flush using the "gray" water we collect from our shower. Which brings me to...

2. We save water from our shower, mostly just from that cold water that runs as we wait for the hot water to arrive. We put this water into buckets and use it for things like watering plants and mopping the floor. Again, it's insane just how much perfectly good water we were throwing away. I end up with more water than I know what to do with.

3. We take quick showers and turn off the water while soaping up. I don't shower every day, or if I need to shower every day, I don't always wash my hair. Yes, I know this sounds really gross. But showering every day isn't actually healthy for your skin-- it strips your body of natural oils. I once heard a beauty expert (an expert!) liken washing hair every day to scrubbing a delicate silk blouse daily. I don't smell bad, really! (Aren't you glad you interact with me via the Internet, not in person?) Once again, this saves a TON of perfectly good drinking water.

4. I wash dishes like an Israeli Follow the link to learn how. I've now started to put all my dishes in the sink when I rinse off the soap, so the water rinsed off one dish starts to clean the next. I'm thinking now that I can start collecting that mostly-clean water in a bin and use it to soak my dishes for next time. I don't have a dishwasher, so this is the best I can do for now. I'm trying to convince my husband that we never need to wash dishes at all... imagine how much water we'd save. (I'm kidding! Mostly. Some of you suggested switching to plastic plates to save water, but because our shortage is year-round, I think we'd do more harm to environment than good that way.)

5. I don't do silly things like wash my sheets every week or my jeans and sweaters every day. It's for the Kinneret, people.

Now that it's winter, we need to make even more effort to saving water so that we have water to use next summer. 2.5 cubic meters per person per month still sounds like a lot, though, and I want to try to cut our water usage down more. Any suggestions? What do you do to save water? How much water do you use each month?

"Cat" is the new "Squirrel"

When Israelis heard I planned to bring a cat to Israel, their universal response was this: "Why? We have plenty of those here!"

I read recently that Israel has 6 million street cats, which means that the ratio of street cats to Jewish residents in Israel is about 1:1. (It seems higher!) And I realized a few months ago that I have yet to see a squirrel in this country: hardly a coincidence. As a consequence, Israelis see cats basically the way we see squirrels-- as ubiquitous, dirty nuisances. (Some Israelis do own pet cats, but more often they own pet dogs who bark crazily at the roaming neighborhood cats.)

Street cats lounge around the yards, sidewalks, and alleys of Israel wherever you look. At first glance, they look no different from house cats-- often they are quite well-fed, and until you approach to a dangerous proximity, they sunbathe and preen just as any other cat would. They are also very territorial: I recognize the cats (like the one in the picture) who live in our apartment building courtyard, and different cats live down the street where my husband's aunt and uncle live. The cats own their specific sections of the streets, just as Zeus and Pixel own my apartment.

Closer up, they do have a harder life. Sometimes people would bring street cats into the vet's office where I volunteered for my first few months here, and they bore the scars of life on the street*-- I won't go into detail because, frankly, there was a reason I wouldn't eat big lunches after working at the vet's office. Our vet would provide medical care at a big discount, and he would never let a street cat leave without spaying or neutering it-- marking that the job had been done by snipping the point off of one of the cat's ears. (All vets do this, so keep your eyes out for point-less ears!)

Quite a few people feed street cats, leading to immense feeding frenzies. My husband says that the cats now look much better fed than they did when he grew up in Beer Sheva in the 80s, leading to what he calls the "Street Cat Economic Index"-- the fatness of our street cats illustrates the strength of our economy. We have money to put out water, food, or throw precious scraps into our garbage, and the cats benefit.

I once saw a cat that seemed to have been twisted up into the fork of a small tree, and I panicked that the cat had been killed and put there by teenage hoodlums. (In fact, I told my husband not to look-- he has an even softer heart for cats than I do. His camera phone is full of pictures of cute cats he ogles on his commute to work. :) Instead, my husband approached the tree-- and the cat untangled herself, sprang down, and scrambled off into the bushes. She was simply catching a nap in her treetop hammock.

My cousin studying at a hareidi yeshiva in Jerusalem claims to have been told that cats are the reincarnated souls of prostitutes. In that case, I'm not sure what the sheer quantity of cats says about this country. :) (Maybe, based on my post yesterday, they are the reincarnated souls of women who DRESS somewhat like prostitutes, but who are actually very nice and chaste...)

*The cats, not the people