Fall Back

It's time for another new season, possibly my favorite out of all. I do love me some cold (for whatever bizarre, masochistic reason) but the changing of the season guard as we segue into autumn heralds to me so many of the things that feel right about life. The days are pleasant and crisp, the nights chill, the falling leaves a reminder of the circle of life, school days start up again, etc. I could go on. But I won't, because I don't write enough blog entries as it is and shouldn't take up the majority of it with my blather on the seasons yet again (notice a trend to stay away from this blog until a new season starts up; this is not purposefully intentional (and redundant redundant) but it's obviously a crutch for me).

This summer for us has been a real sharpening of family resources and sustainability. We've finally moved off fuel oil as the primary method for heating our house and water. You have no idea how awesome this makes me feel: the only fuel I burn now is in our hybrid car. Electricity is definitely the way to go in my mind, and while it will go up in cost in the next few years and the generation of it itself is not always the cleanest, changes are afoot. We've taken to many methods of conserving as much as possible and my hopes for the future are we as a nation will pull away from dirty burning methods as the primary source of electric power generation. There are also potentials for future additions to the house that will offset some of our reliance on the grid (solar water heating, personal wind turbine, purchasing green energy) although that is a few years off. My pipe dream of some day being "off grid" is just that; with our current culture and economy there is just no cost effective way to fully generate enough power from the sun and store it. Energy storage seems to be the biggest hurdle here and will be for years to come. So, conservation and smart additions are the current method to my green madness.

As I mentioned, the main thing we have done is replace our oil steam boiler with a high efficiency heat pump. Yes, our basement was privy to a railroad-inspired contraption that literally burned oil so it could evaporate water into steam which expanded throughout pipes in our house and made heat. As romantic as that sounds, it was terribly inefficient, hot, noisy, and fairly archaic. The new system isn't exactly what I wanted, as it is an air-source heat pump that (get this) draws moisture out of the air and converts this to cool or hot air as needed. Something like that, I still don't understand it completely. Originally the plan was to bury towards the center of the Earth and use actual geothermal energy, which is basically using the rather constant temperature of the ground to heat or cool the house as necessary. However, these units are more expensive and our meager land was insufficient to find a drill location (they need a fair amount of space to bury the needed pipes into the ground) so the plans changed. With the cost of what a geothermal unit would have been, we instead went with the heat pump (the highest efficiency model available really) and added new windows to the budget that allow our system to be that much more effective. It is basically the last major improvement to our humble castle that will allow it to be better than it was when it was built. Any other improvements we do are cosmetic at this point and that's a pretty good feeling.

Well, cosmetic in a sense. The next great project I am undertaking (with the grand Wall completed) is a picket fence that will house the doggies and kiddies within the yard proper. My major reason for all the outside work I've been doing over the years has been to tie the front and back together better than it was. Like I have described before, the previous retaining wall that I replaced with a stone wall was too long: it cut the yard in half. The Wall, with its majestic curve, allows space along the side yard where the fence will journey down the hill and hopefully bring about a better unity between the front and back yards. The fence is not without its peculiarities; I won't get into it with this entry but save it for a better update that chronicles The Wall project and how the fence fits into that.

Yon bebe approaches her first! In mere days she will be one year of age, and what a year it has been. Where we go from here is indeed an adventure for the ages. She babbles in an almost coherent "like English" and is ready to graduate to a terrifying method of transportation. Pretty soon we'll be calling the thing a toddler, as scary as that sounds. It makes a parent proud, however, to see how far she has come. It's easy to question why someone would want to have a baby; it's a little harder to explain that the reasoning behind that is to be a parent.

Blog on.