Week 2, Zanna - Leave No Trace.

The Exercise:  "Choose one room of your house and for one week try leaving no trace that you've used that space.  The bathroom or kitchen works best for most people. If you've been doing something in that room, cooking a meal or taking a shower, clean up in such a way that you leave no signs that you've been there, except perhaps the odor of food or fragrance of soap."

See that? She missed a spot.  

I've seen CSI. This is impossible.  What with Macguffin Cells, and Spurious DNA, it's impossible to not leave something behind.  But in the spirit of entertainment or science or self discovery or something, I moved ahead. Being me, with my predisposition to make things infinitely more complicated than they need to be, my first thought was One room isn't enough...I'll do it everywhere!  Yeah. That lasted about five minutes. I'm not a complete slob, but it's extremely inefficient to put things away every time you leave the room. In addition to that, I have a husband and cats. Their ability to generate mess should not be underestimated, and I felt I needed to keep up with them as well... even though that wasn't the assignment. So I settled on the master bathroom.  The cats don't go in there, and I could safely ignore the spouse's sink area (huzzah for double sinks!)   At the start of the modified exercise, the first thing I noticed was that leaving no trace, leaves a trace on the environment. I was going through too many paper towels! So, early on, I switched to regular towels, which still generated extra laundry. I clean the bathroom at least once a week, it never gets super disgusting, so the cleaning every time I left the room seemed to be a waste of resources.  I did notice that, while men are nasty and leave big messes, I seem to blame my husband for more than his share of mess.  Because we do clean regularly, I know what to expect at the end of a week. The bathroom was about half as messy as it usually is at the end of the week. Apparently, we create equal quantities of mess. Perhaps I should ease up on the nagging.  Nah.
For me the lessons learned/verified are: Cleaning as you go makes for a smaller cleaning job later.  And, on a global scale, we always leave a trace. Being aware of that and all the ways we impact the world we live in is worth knowing.

I'm not going to give away anything on the blog about week three, but if you see me in person, ask me about how you can get involved. It could be lucrative for you!

BTW, if SOPA/PIPA goes through, using the picture I used could get this site banned. This is silly. Write your congress folk.