I’m looking forward to sleeping in my own bed tonight. I realized that I have been in and out of an alarming number of beds the past 10 days.
Two Thursdays ago I headed down to New York City for BlogHer. I stayed in a hotel with one friend the first night, and with another in another hotel the second. Then I headed home for one night before we went as a family to New Hampshire for a couple of nights. We got home so late on Tuesday night that I ended up sleeping in Phoebe’s bed with her. The next night was back to my own bed, and the following night we hit the road again to visit my in-laws, where we stayed for 3 nights. That makes 6 beds in 10 nights.
Our daycare was closed for vacation last week, which somewhat prompted the trip to New Hampshire. We had lots of fun visiting Storyland on Monday and Tuesday, a theme park that is geared towards younger kids. We even met up with some friends there. Wednesday I managed to get Phoebe off to preschool, and Theo and I mostly hung out and napped for the day until it was suddenly time to pick up Phoebe. On Thursday, Phoebe went into work with John, and Theo and I spent another day together doing largely nothing, while I tried to do laundry, get ready for the next trip, and squeeze in some emails. (Who are these stay-at-home parents who actually manage fun projects with the kids? I think they are myth to make me strive to behave better. Like Santa. But they don’t bring me chocolate.) And then we headed down to the in-laws, where John’s two sisters were also visiting for a celebration of John’s dad’s 84th birthday. The trips and visits were all lovely, but our schedules have been completely whackadoo. And I’m really zonked now.
So if you’ve wondered about the stretch of silence around here, it’s because I’ve been all over the place and haven’t had much time to myself. My “spare” moments have been eaten up largely by work stuff. I’m happy to say that I have managed to keep up with Project 365, though, so if you want to see some of what I’ve been up to, you can see some of it in my Flickr photo stream.
I’ve got more stuff to say (when do I not?), but will have to get to it later. (Yeah, “later.” We know what that means…) For now, I am hoping to get to my bed before I fall asleep here on the couch.
By the way, please check out the July Just Posts, which Holly and I finally got up today. I ended up throwing up my post in a hurry before packing up my laptop at my in-laws. I learned later that all the links were broken. (Throwing up a post, indeed…) The links are fixed now.
Welcome to the latest Just Post roundtable, a collection of posts from the month of July on topics relating to social justice hosted here and at Cold Spaghetti.
If you have a post in the list above, or would just like to support the Just Posts, we invite you to display a button on your blog with a link back here, or to the Just Posts at Cold Spaghetti. If you would like to have a post included next month, you can find out how to submit posts and all sorts of other stuff about the Just Posts at the information page.
The early bird catches the worm. But sometimes, the night owl catches the early bird for a tasty midnight snack.
For the past several years, after reading all sorts of hoopla and general excitement over BlogHer, the big annual blogging conference, I have really wanted to go. But the timing has never worked out for me to make the big trip. This year the conference is scheduled for New York City. That’s practically next door to me here in Massachusetts. I was sure I would go.
But then, as it usually does, life interfered. Other stuff distracted. I wasn’t sure I’d be able to manage the trip, so I put things off. By the time I got around to realizing that I really wanted to attend, the conference was sold out. I put my name on the waitlist, but months later I still heard nothing.
Then a couple of days ago, I really got a bee in my bonnet about going. So I decided to look into it, and found a message board of people who’d registered, but couldn’t attend, and were selling their tickets. I emailed a few people. In the end, I scored a ticket, and managed to get the registration transfered over to my name yesterday, the last possible day to do so.
The stack of 'business' cards I made to bring with me to BlogHer. (Calling cards? Blogging cards?)
(Of course, I am still trying to work out the details of where I’ll be staying. The early birds are all now peacefully slumbering in the knowledge that they have already figured out their travel plans. I squawk in their general direction.)
Saturday was the sort of summer day that could make me like summer. It was warm and sunny, not too hot, and with no trace of the stifling mugginess that we get all too often these days. It was just the right sort of day for spending a lot of time outside. Almost on a whim, we decided to make a trip to the zoo.
A bunch more photos are in the slideshow below.
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Thanks to my participation in Project 365, I really made an effort to take photos. John even convinced me to switch lenses and use my zoom telephoto, something that in my laziness, I have almost never done. What’s more, I used manual focus a lot. Manual. Focus. I felt so frickin’ badass. Except that, you know, I was at the zoo. Do badasses go to the zoo?
A view from the train on one of my recent commutes.
The deal with resolutions is that we tend to start off full speed, full of enthusiasm and, well, resolve. Before long, however, both enthusiasm and resolve tend to wane.
Last month, in large part in reaction to the Gulf of Mexico oil disaster and my increasing awareness of abuses perpetuated by the petroleum industry, I resolved to decrease my own personal dependence on petroleum. I followed up with a list of specific actions, and specific goals. Among other things, I had committed to tracking much of our fuel consumption.
Part of why I am sharing these details here is to maintain my resolve. I will cut down on my fossil fuel consumption. But the will may need continued prodding.
Electricity
Tracking electricity usage was painless, thanks to my electric company listing kilowatt hour usage by month for the past 12 months. Tracking was painless, but the results were painful. I thought we were more moderate electricity users, but we are on the high end for our region. Our usage for the last 12 months averaged 921 kwh per month. While the average US household uses 920 per month, our state only averages between 500 and 618 kwh. (The second number is from a spreadsheet available from this site with usage by state.)
While I haven’t yet measured the electricity usage of specific items, I have rounded up the following suspects: lights and fans left on unnecessarily, and electronics. I think our past tendency to leave our stereo/home theater receiver on was a drain. We also have a lot of computers, including one large one that has been acting as a server, for a while for John’s work, but mostly as our electronic media repository. We have now gotten into the habit of turning off stereo and video equipment when not listening/watching, and John has set the server to power down at night. We have become more vigilant about turning off lights, fans and air conditioners when we leave rooms, as well.
The good news is that our usage is showing a downward trend. Our July statement showed 854 kwh compared to last July’s 946, a decrease of over 9%. June showed a 20% decrease over last year. (I have no idea why our usage was particularly high last June. 1063 kwh. It wasn’t air conditioning, as that was a cold and rainy month. What on earth were we doing? Giving each other electric shocks?)
I finally got around to signing up for one of my electric company’s renewable energy options. I have yet to get a bill showing the new rates. The cost by wattage will increase, but I’m hoping that our efforts to reduce usage will offset this. We shall see…
Heating oil
Tracking heating oil was more annoying, as I had to go through my bills month by month. (There’s no summary of deliveries.) Deliveries are also somewhat irregular, in both timing and amount, so when I found that I was missing a statement, I couldn’t really guess how much oil was delivered that month, or be certain that oil was even delivered that month. I finally came across the missing bill (helpfully mixed in with phoebe’s art papers), so have added that to my spreadsheet.
While I haven’t found great sources it looks like the average US household using heating oil uses 730 gallons per year, and in the Northeast US is 822 gallons. It looks like we have had 785 gallons delivered to our home in the past 12 months, which puts us slightly lower than the average for our region.
I can’t tell yet how much our usage is changing, but I think I have reduced my hot water usage. The real chance to improve, though, will come in the winter. With that in mind, I have contacted a company that makes storm windows that may work for us, which should significantly reduce the winter draftiness of our house.
Gasoline
Gasoline was the hardest of the three to track, since we don’t tend to file our receipts. I did go through our credit card statements for the last year, and logged all gas station transactions. I only have dollar amounts, not gallon amounts, but this at least gives me a general sense of frequency of filling the tanks. My sense is that we have filled them frequently. I haven’t really worked out the estimates of how frequently yet.
I’m happy to say that I have taken the train to work much more often. This is easy to track, as I bought a 12-ride pass on June 8th, and have used all 12. Each of those saved me about 35 miles of driving. I’ve even gotten a second 12-ride pass. In fact, due to slower summer schedules, I’ve only needed to drive into work maybe 3 times in the last couple months. (Plus there have been a few trips for recreational reasons.)
Other stuff
I have been doing pretty well with buying local food. I found a place to buy eggs that is only a couple of miles from us, and finally found a farm stand within 10 miles of our house. (I just don’t understand how local produce can be so hard to find in such a rural area. Gah!) We also managed to go blueberry picking a few times at the place down the road…before they abruptly closed for the season. (No!)
I have been doing a good job with reducing our use of new plastic containers. I have used my stainless steel water bottle regularly, and (aside from when I was travelling) have only resorted to buying bottled water a couple of times.
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There. That’s the skinny on my recent efforts to reduce my fossil fuel gluttony. If anyone has actually read this far, you deserve a prize. Like maybe a big, fat virtual hug from me.
001:365 A wild raspberry from my yard in a shiny bowl.
I have signed on to participate in Project 365, a project which encourages people to learn to count past 364. I keep counting up to about 12, and then I get distracted by something shiny. Why just the other day, I was looking in the fridge to see how many eggs we had and then hey look somebody dropped a dime. I wonder how many dimes I have? Maybe I’ll count them. Did I ever mention that I once had a dime collection? They were shiny.
Where was I? Oh, right. Project 365. A project wherein/whereby/wherefore/whatif/whatwasIsaying people take (at least) a picture a day, and share a picture a day online. The lovely Sue has rounded up a crew to join her in this daily shutterbugginess. I have joined the crew. I’ve never done crew before. I hope this isn’t too strenuous. My freshman roommate was in crew. She had to run a lot. Every day. I can’t run to save my life. And certainly not every day. Hopefully I will be able to manage to take and share photo every day, and hopefully it won’t need to be to save my life. (As far as I know, there are no fatal consequences of missing a day, but perhaps I didn’t read all the fine print.)
I don’t plan to inflict all of my photos on you here. (Just some of them.) If you would like to see all of them, I’ll be aiming to put them up daily on my shiny new Flickr stream. Oooo, shiny.
Last Saturday, the hourly forecast showed quick storms at 1:00 and then again later in the afternoon, but with otherwise sunny skies and relatively low chance of precipitation. Even with the chance of rain, we decided to motor on to get to Micro Mini Car Day.
As predicted, the morning was clear and hot. We’d hoped to leave around noon to make the start of the car show at 1:00, but with the typical challenges of getting everyone fed and otherwise ready to go, it was closer to 1 by the time we got the kids buckled into the car. As I ran back to the house to grab one last thing, John called out to me to also grab some umbrellas.
I don’t have many superstitions, but I know for certain that the best way to avoid rain is to bring an umbrella. In this respect, the umbrellas failed us. Which is not to say that we were sorry to have them with us.
The hourly forecast was partially correct. It did indeed rain around 1. But it then continued to rain. And rain. And rain hard. And then it rained harder, and it rained some more. And did I mention that it rained?
I did manage to get a few photos, though, as I huddled under my umbrella.
Here is Phoebe with a bigger Mini. (I have a photo of her with the same Mini from last year.)
As you can see, the attendees were still very enthusiastic about the event. Here is someone braving the rain to photograph a convertible Isetta along with some sort of matching toy version. (I was very curious about the sort of pod-like, three-wheeled gray thing on the right, but didn’t have much chance learn what it was. Note that there is also what appears to be a black pole sticking out of the roof of the museum. That was my umbrella strap.)
Here’s are a couple of bigger Isettas. They seat 4!
Here’s that gray pod thing again, which I think looks a lot like the end of a bullet train or monorail. But a whole lot smaller.
I took this photo from the gift shop, up in the museum building, where I’d gone to get a t-shirt for John. (John’s shirt had gotten completely soaked while he was pushing Theo in the stroller, while trying to keep his umbrella moderately covering Theo.)
We spent quite a while inside the museum waiting for the rain to lighten up. Um…it didn’t.
By 4:00, the scheduled end of the show, the rain finally started to slow. By the time we returned to our car, it was barely raining at all. Then the clouds parted, and the sun came back out.
This is all to say that we went to the car show, but it was very wet. This wetness was, further, the only period of such wetness the whole weekend.
I was not sorry that we went, but it wasn’t quite the experience I might have hoped for. For one thing, they weren’t able to have the rides in the cars, at least not after we arrived. The rain was torrential, for one thing. And the attendees were drenched. (Would you want soggy-bottomed strangers plopping themselves down in your car?) And then to top it all off, a retaining wall collapsed from the rain onto part of the circular driveway where the car rides typically passed. So, no ride in an Isetta for me after all.
If you have a post in the list above, or would just like to support the Just Posts, we invite you to display a button on your blog with a link back here, or to the Just Posts at Cold Spaghetti. If you would like to have a post included next month, you can find out how to submit posts and all sorts of other stuff about the Just Posts at the information page.
collecting tokens 