I’ve been living with this for the last twenty years. It’s not so bad in these waters as long as you don’t stop swimming. Ever.

The show is still about a month away and the groups are busily practicing their hearts out as they prepare. I’ve still got a lot to do (final key changes, chart book assembly, final locked CDs, show track mastering, final score delivery, and on and on), but for now a big milestone has been passed. Onward!

If you’d like to hear me blab narcissistically, you can listen to it online here. Erin can’t understand how I can blithely go on the radio and just jabber. Guess it comes from standing in front of large groups of people and having them do what I say. After doing that for so long it’s a natural assumption that people would be interested.

This video talks about the risk factors for melanoma (early sunburns, family history, moles, etc). I have just about every risk factor except red hair (who knew?). I also go to the dermatologist once a year and have had at least a dozen moles removed since mom’s diagnosis. I share this because keeping up with this has become easy, routine, and something that we budget for in our annual medical expenses. $250/year isn’t much to pay to make sure I don’t die from melanoma. It’s not fun or painless, but it just may be the difference in the future.

This is for you, mom…

Worth watching.

100 watts (2 bulbs at 50%)
15 hours/day
365 days
547,500watt hours/year
547.5kWh/year
at .14 cents/kWh, the backyard lights cost us $76.65/year. Add in the front lights and we’re talking a little over $120/year to run. The new lights cost about $250 so that’s 2 years to pay them back. Still looking for a good LED replacement to go over the front door (preferably dimmable somehow).

We also got front and back storm doors, which will hopefully help in reducing drafts and air leakage. I also fixed a great big (1″ x 3″) hole in our front door frame a few months ago and it’s been a big help- mostly because now we don’t get overrun by rolly-poly bugs every few weeks.

I wish they made candelabra LED bulbs in a real-world 60 watts. I tried the “40 watt equivalent” type yesterday and they were dim and ghastly, so back they went. My office lights are a pair of 40 watt candelabra style that run about 15 hours per day. Total annual cost there is $60 in electricity (438kWh). If I replaced them with 10 watt LED’s I could cut that down to $15 (109kWh).

We’re just trying to grab some of the low-hanging energy fruit around here in an effort to lower the bills. We’ve even looked at a grid-tied solar panel system, but the roof isn’t the best for it (too many pipes jutting from our south-facing surface). The water heater needs to be replaced in the next year or so, so paying for a solar water heater might work, but our current heater is gas and the replacement will be so efficient that even if we added a solar heat backup system, the amortization time would be a couple of decades. If it was an electric heater we’d do it, but gas is still really cheap.

The thing I’d really like to do is replace our super cheap windows with good dual-pane argon filled ones, and then build supplementary interior thermal insulation panels to further increase insulation. But, wow, are new windows expensive. A full-house retrofit would cost about $15,000 and we’re not going to be here nearly long enough to justify that. Even so, standard walls have an insulation value (R-value) of 19. Our super cheap builder-grade windows have an R-value of…. one. Yes, one. So even adding a single layer of thermal insulation via a built-up interior window insert could save us 30% on our heating and cooling bills (according to online claims I’ve seen). That works out to hundreds of dollars per year for something that’s very cheap to build. The cheapest way is a wooden frame with plastic heat-shrink stretched across it. With my woodworking skills I think I could do much better than that- I’m thinking plexiglass laminate inserts with a second layer of plastic stretch material on the inside. This would create a double layer of insulating dead air space. I figure I could do it for about $50 per window. $600 for the whole house with a 2-3 year payback period.

The other obvious thing is to add insulation in the attic, which is probably in the cards sometime. I just wish we could super-insulate the walls, but that ship has sailed.

I would dearly love to take a few years and plan out a completely off-grid, super-insulated and self-sufficient house on paper and then build the thing myself. The thought of being free of all utilities– electric, water, gas, etc— is pretty appealing.

So that’s where we sit now in our energy conservation quest. 12000kWh last year, goal of 10,000kWh next year. A roughly 17% reduction in electrical use and an annual savings of almost $300. I’ll report back in a year and run the numbers to see what happens.

(Via .)

Great Christmas present idea!

Maybe we can lose it again! Talk to you in another two months!

This would be only slightly distressing if it hadn’t happened to me twice. On two different invoices.

Sigh.

To those of you who envy my self-employed, freewheeling ways: witness the downside. At this point, some of my major clients have proven themselves to actually be less responsible than 20 year old college students.

“Less attention is devoted to failure, or even what failure is. There is financial failure — bankruptcy — professional failure — unemployment — and personal failure — divorce. But there are all kinds of failure — failing your parents, failing your faith, failing to live up to your own expectations of who you think you should be.

I fail all the time, so often that I am somewhat mystified when I get emails in which people perceive me as successful. Because most of the time, I think of myself as a failure. Which, I’ve come to think, is part of what makes me successful.”

via Forbes.