Fiat Lux

On Wednesday afternoon my neighbor helped me paint the kitchen, and I put a second coat on Wednesday evening. Since then I've been finishing up the electrical, putting down the plywood for the underlayment or flooring if we go that route, and getting ready to hang cabinets. Adding the main fluorescent light fixture made a huge difference. Now it feels like a real room. A room with a heck of a lot of outlets, to be sure, but a real room.

It's Good Stuff

I realized I haven't given any updates in a while. I haven't been getting tons done on the house, partly because of other tasks, but largely because of lack of energy. Much of what Kat and I have done recently is cleaning up the yard. The Oakland FD came around the other month to give the friendly reminder that we live in a high risk fire area. The yard was horribly behind in maintenance, so we've been weed-whacking, raking, pulling vines, chopping stumps, etc. to get things in line. Three big green yard waste bins filled, and at least three more to go. Probably four since I've almost filled the bin again today. But it's good stuff, that needs to be done.

I have done some work on the house. I installed an additional light on the front of the addition to help light the pathway at night. And I installed reading lights over the bed. Kat and I read a lot. Even more of late because the TV died. It died a couple years ago, the power supply or a nearby capacitor, or both, and I got it repaired. Given the cost of TVs these days, we decided it was time to finally replace it, as it was pushing 20 years old. The new TV has a gorgeous picture, at least when watching the amazing photography in Planet Earth. It's a 4 disc series narrated by David Attenborough, and has some breath-taking images from around the world. I highly recommend checking it out.

Somewhat less breath-taking, but still lovely, is the view in our bedroom showing the new reading lights. Alas, the one on my side of the bed has a bad switch, but they'll be sending a new one along shortly.

It's Not Easy Being Green

Kermit the Frog had it right. There are a lot of 'green' things that are hard. It's hard to get out of your car and ride a bike or take mass transit (even if those are a generally a lot cheaper). It's hard to find truly green building materials; there's not as much variety yet, and in some cases they're more expensive (though in most cases those things pay for the difference over time).

But a really easy green thing to do is use compact fluorescent lights instead of incandescent lights. It's hard to spell, so call them CFLs and say floor-ess-uhnt. And you don't have to spell it when you grab a package of them at your local hardware store. Recently, Seth Godin challenged bloggers to push the benefits of CFLs, as only 6% of the households in the U.S. are using them.

They take less energy than incandescents. Despite having a small amount of mecury in them, they put less mercury into the environment because burning coal for power (which is where large amounts of the power in the U.S. comes from) puts out (literally) tons of mercury. They give off less heat (not a big deal in winter, but no sense making your A/C or fans work harder than they have to in summer). They last longer so you don't have to get that step ladder out so often. Unlike fluorescent lights of old (though the long tube ones are still this way), they come on immediately and don't flicker.

And despite a higher up-front cost, over their lifetime they'll save an average of $66 each. We have a fairly small house, and I can think of 30 bulbs -- $1,980 of savings.

What's not to like? (OK, those annoying plastic blister packs they come in, for one.) But it can be easy to be green.