Ta dah! That picture of a new ceiling fan in my living room serves multiple purposes for the site. First, it’s a demonstration of Somara’s skill with tools, electrical equipment and reading the manual. I could’ve done it but it would’ve taken longer, she’s the one with more experience on the home repair front so I defer to her with those matters. I still write the checks though. I also helped by assembling the blades while Somara hooked up the other elements. Second, the fan is there (and another will be installed into our bedroom later today) with those better light bulbs that last for years and use less energy to lower our electric bill (they give off the light of a 60 Watt bulb but only use 13!). I already signed up for Green Mountain’s 100% wind powered-based electricity but now those bulbs should lower our monthly bill, which also dovetails into improving out carbon neutrality score. Third, we had to turn off the power circuit to the living room for several hours to do this. Picayune and KMAG’s server is in the living room so the site and stream were done Monday afternoon and early evening. Oh, you didn’t notice. I guess you won’t notice when I have to take it offline again for the additional fan in the bedroom this Tuesday. (Maybe I should sprinkle my site with entries referencing body parts to gain traffic as the author of Mythstory jokingly stated on May 4th.)
I know I should’ve reported the outage sooner. Monday was too exhausting. By the time we completed the fan’s installation, we rushed out to install three pieces of sod on the front yard while there was still sunlight. It’s progress on my lawn to shut up the Jacobian HOA. After the sod, carpet-bombing of the fire ants (my least favorite invasive species to Central Texas after Republicans and Developers) and cleaning up the mess; we rewarded ourselves with Rudy’s BBQ for dinner. Definitely an unholy temple for the vegetarians. All the fresh air, exercise followed by great food meant watching the rerun of Futurama put me to sleep. I did manage to answer a couple phone calls before passing out on the couch!
Anyway, the ceiling fan was part of my larger plan to lower our footprint on the planet. Earth Day came and went plus Al Gore has a new documentary coming out. Talk crap all you want about the guy. At least he can actually write his own books without a ghost writer unlike JFK and the current chimp in the White House. (I know I promised neutrality on my site, forgive me but Al’s not running for office so he’s free to promote the causes close to his heart which his 2000 handlers wouldn’t let him pursue.) Back to my point. Around Earth Day, Somara pointed me to a web site that did a rough estimate of how many Earths were needed to sustain the 6.5 billion people based upon my lifestyle. Admittedly, it’s not to the letter in accuracy. Even the site admits it, their math is more forgiving of how much you may actually be gobbling up. I’m to the left of the curve but still scored pretty badly for how much I used (almost five earths needed, compared to the average American’s six and a half). A couple of the things I was dinged on can’t be avoided in my opinion: if flying to Las Vegas once a year is bad, would driving there be much better with the emissions from my 10-year-old VW Golf? The closest city the site offered was Phoenix which is in a desert. I think Austin would have a better score. I did better on the Carbon Neutrality score from the Gore site (it’s concerned only with Global Warming, not the bigger sustainability picture). This prompted me to replace every commonly used room’s bulbs with the long-lasting ones which use less power while giving off the same amount of light. Now to wait and see if we can get our power bill to be more reasonable.
Next step? Long-term saving for either getting a new hybrid or a used diesel car to run on biodiesel.