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We’ve had the house for less than 24 hours and I’m already psyched to pull off all the crazy textured wallpaper and rip up the carpet to reveal hardwood floors.  Alas, it’s a lot of work!  We spent several hours today pulling the top layer of wallpaper off the family room walls (the backing and paste tend to stay behind).  A guy from Vectren came by to turn on the gas and told me that I should make my life simpler and buy a gallon of magical solution called Dif that supposedly takes wallpaper right off.

I looked it up and learned that Dif is a wallpaper stripper with a “unique patented enzyme formula” and “a superior, more effective blend of wetting agents” that have made it a must-have for wallpaper removal projects.

Of course, my question is, what is the environmental impact of this stuff?  I looked at the MSDS (Material Safety Data Sheet) but it is really designed for firefighters and hazardous waste clean-up crews so there wasn’t detailed information about its overall environmental impacts.  I’m pretty sure Dif is more environmentally harmful than using hot water but I’m also pretty sure it’s a lot faster.  At what point can a person justify an increased environmental impact to save some physical labor?  For this project, I would feel a lot better sticking with the manual labor - I could use the exercise!  But the question of trade-offs comes up a lot and it’s almost always impossible to get all the information needed to make the best decision.

My dad says that someone needs to come up with a Green Consumer Reports that would crunch all the data concerning the environmental impact of how an item is produced, how it’s used during its life, and how it gets disposed of.  I keep telling him it’s a great idea except I don’t think that data even exists for most products.  But maybe someone just needs to give it their best shot and refine as they go.

Any publishing moguls out there?  I’m handy with a blog and a wallpaper scraper…

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Well, we are now officially homeowners.  *zowie*  We’re excited and exhausted and a bit unsure that it really happened.  Even this morning we were getting phone calls asking us to pull up a few more bits of financial information and be prepared to sign just a couple more preliminary papers before the closing and it seemed to all be hanging by a thread.  But we managed to do the final walk-through inspection, meet the sellers for the first time (very sweet people), sign an almost endless stack of papers, hand over about one year’s salary, and we were given the keys.

It was actually a bit anticlimactic.  We signed papers for about an hour and then everyone pat us on the back and said “Congratulations!”

It didn’t really feel real until we took my parents over and started peeling off the 70’s textured wallpaper in the living room.  I have realized that for me, the best way to make it feel real is to start making some changes, to leave my mark and claim it as MINE.  And Will’s.  Although technically I think the mortgage company owns about 95% at this point…

Anyway, it’s a relief to be done with the purchasing process.  We’ll be spending the next month doing a little remodeling (there are hardwood floors under the carpet!) and slowly moving in our belongings.  Let us know if you have any green remodeling tips!

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Maggie and I have been looking for a good source of organic ice cream since February. For some reason, getting an ice cream maker hadn’t really occurred to us until I got one for my brother and his wife for their wedding. After hearing of their success with some great iced concotions, Maggie and I were even more interested. We took the final leap when we found an old shopping network ice cream maker at a yard sale for $10.

As a kid, our ice cream maker was a monstrosity, with a huge bright pink bucket (or perhaps I was just smaller then). You had to dump in ice and salt and churn it continuously. It was pretty grueling work for half an hour, but spread out among the five of us it wasn’t bad. And there was ice cream at the end!

The new ones work a bit differently. Instead of hand-churning, most of them use an electric motor (which makes it a bit faster too, I think). They also replace the salted ice with a smaller metal bucket with a liquid core. You leave that in the freezer until you’re ready to make some ice cream and then toss all the ingredients in and turn on the motor.

Our first experiment was honey-flavored frozen yogurt. The recipe called for corn syrup, but we thought the honey would work better. Unfortunately, we didn’t eat it right away and it solidified in the freezer. It was rock-hard, which made it hard to sample.

This past weekend, we got the ingredients necessary for actual ice cream (primarily heavy cream). The recipe made much more than actually fit in the container, especially once we put in some peach slices from the peaches my parents brought from the NC farmers’ market. The first batch turned out pretty well, although I had to clear peach blockages out every once in a while. The second batch just never froze completely and ended up as more of a milkshake. Unlike the old ice cream makers, you can’t just add more ice, so we either had to leave it at the milkshake level or dump it into the freezer and stir manually.

We took the ice cream to Maggie’s family’s Sunday gathering and it was a hit, especially alongside the peach crumb dessert (also from the NC farmers’ market). It was more crystalline than I expected, but that wasn’t bad. The peaches were also frozen solid, which shouldn’t have surprised me. I think next time I’ll try putting the fruit bits in towards the end of the process so they’ll be chewier.

Overall, we’re very pleased with it. Now we can make ice cream as organic as we want it to be. The size is just about perfect too. A quart of ice cream is enough to take to a gathering, but little enough that we can eat it all ourselves if need be (twist my arm!).

Our other beat-the-heat treat has been fruit juice frozen into popsicles. Generally, I think I prefer those (they’re great in the hot middle of the day), while Maggie prefers the ice cream as an after-dinner dessert.

In both cases, it helps make the heat more bearable when we’ve got something cool to eat, so they’re definitely worth the (minimal) effort!

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We saw WALL-E yesterday with our parents and thoroughly enjoyed it (as well as the short that preceded it). I’ll mostly just echo the thoughts of others, but I was also impressed with how well they pulled off a main character (and love interest) who speak less than half a dozen words throughout the entire movie.

As with most movies, the science is only middling correct. One of the advantages of the stylization of the movie is that I didn’t mind because all of the science mistakes seemed less like ignorance and more like a stylistic choice. For example, the plan to clean Earth up apparently consists of crushing and piling the garbage. How that’s supposed to help, I don’t know, but it sure makes for some incredible visuals.

There’s definitely a strong environmental call-to-action in the movie, but it comes across very well. Instead of seeming patronizing or accusing, I felt like the message was that we can really do anything we set our minds to… so we’d better start thinking about the environment!

Above the visuals and the moral, the storytelling was top-notch. WALL-E and EVE are incredibly human (moreso than the humans, at least at first), so you care about them even if the implied crisis (Earth being buried under garbage) doesn’t thrill you.

I did find a late scene ironic, though. Despite the green overtones of the movie, the humans living in space have solved their garbage problems by… tossing their trash out the airlock. Not a huge advance over piling their trash into monuments.

Hopefully, we’ll be able to figure out something better by the time we get there. We’ve got less than a millenia to go, so we’d better hurry up!

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We’ll blame the lack of posting yesterday on Will’s parents, who are in town for a whirlwind visit on their way to Saint Louis. We tried to show them our house (we hope soon) today but unfortunately, when the owners moved out they locked a lock that the realtor doesn’t have a key to. *sigh* So we walked around the outside and tried to describe what it looks like behind the blue vinyl and mini-blinds.

Life is a bit stressful these days between wedding planning and house buying and the long laundry list of projects I have piled on my plate, not realizing that even tiny commitments add up quickly. I am looking forward to a long holiday weekend and a chance to spend some time relaxing in the out-of-doors. The fireflies are out and the day lilies are in full bloom. I’m ready to lie on my back in a field looking up at the stars. I’m eager to walk in the woods and listen to the summer cicadas. Maybe I’ll make it down to the lake and throw myself in the water. I’m ready to reconnect with nature and with relaxation, in celebration of summer.

Happy Explosion Day.

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In my last post, I forgot the best way to beat the heat: get the temperature to drop. I’m not sure how to do that, but apparently posting about how to beat the heat works. Since I did, it’s been 60 degrees at night and in the low eighties during the day.

Co-worker Ian and I took advantage of it ourselves this evening when we headed downtown to pick up wedding invitations from Twisted Limb. They carpool in to work, which is great because their office is pretty far out from town, so they brought our invitations in to town with them on the way back.

Ian and I walked the six blocks from there to the library and it seems like everyone else was out too. Along with the normal pedestrians, there were lots of cyclists, including some with pretty serious attachments to carry kids or stuff.

I’ve also been seeing a lot of scooters around. I get a kick out of watching them zoom past with a blank space where their license plate would be (scooters don’t need a license in IN).

The change in weather was good timing too, since my parents are coming up tomorrow. Here’s to some good weather times!

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I dropped by to visit my friends Nathan and Maggie (and Laurelynn) on Sunday and found their yard bustling with activity. They were hosting a work party to help build a workshop behind their house. Nathan is a passionate woodworker and tinkerer and wanted plenty of space for his hobbies (although I think he also wanted an excuse to build a building using cool natural building techniques).

The foundation, framing, and metal roof had all been installed previously and this work party was focused on filling in the walls. Slipstraw is pretty straightforward. Once the frame of the building is up, you come through and screw a piece of plywood about 2 feet tall to the inside and the outside. This makes a little box and the empty space is where you want the wall. The wall itself will be made of slipstraw and the plywood will eventually be removed. (In this main picture of the building, all you see are the finished slipstraw walls where the plywood has been removed.)

To make slipstraw, mix clay and straw until it is a slimy, sticky, mess and then shove it in between the pieces of plywood. The goal is to basically make bricks in place so the next step is to pound it as hard as possible and keep adding more slipstraw. Eventually it will be packed so tightly that you can remove the plywood and the slipstraw will harden into place. Oh, and you can also put in windows as you go, slipstrawing around them. They used some awesome retro-looking glass blocks.

Nathan said (if I remember correctly) that the seeds in the straw will sprout shortly after you’ve pounded your walls into place, while the clay is still wet. However, as the slipstraw dries out, the sprouts will die. So you wait until your walls turn green and then die and turn brown again and then you know it’s dry. Then you come through with a protective coating of earthen plaster on each side. They are planning to stick with a basic mud-color brown for the outside but use a bit of whitewash on the inside to give it more of a finished look and lighten up the interior. Their chicken coop has a protective coating of earthen plaster that has stayed rock hard in the four years since they built it so they’re feeling very confident that the building will hold up well.

So why the fuss about natural building? Part of it is a desire to minimize use of nonrenewable resources and potentially toxic substances. Part is the joy of creating a building using materials you gathered yourself. (In this case, the clay came from the pond they are digging in the backyard and the straw was purchased from a farmer outside of town.) And part of it is certainly aesthetics; it’s much more original than vinyl siding, at least in this neck of the woods. There’s also an element of adventure and a degree of flexibility in most natural building styles. I don’t have the physical strength to lug bricks around but I can build a house one armful of muddy straw at a time without taxing myself. The slipstraw part also doesn’t take much skill, although it does take a lot of labor and it definitely helps to have someone in charge who can make sure that the slipstraw is not too wet, not too dry, and pounded just hard enough. For now, I’m content to be the grunt labor for an hour or two and then stand back and admire the building coming together.

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It’s starting to feel a lot like summer. We had a couple days of hot weather about three weeks ago, but since then it’s been in the high 70s and low 80s. In the past several days, it’s been up to the high 80s and lower 90s and should stay that way for at least a week. Since it’s still June, I expect it’ll only get worse.

We’ve only turned the AC on once, briefly, when it was hot and stuffy before bed and I’d like to keep it that way as long as possible. Working from home makes it harder, since I can’t mooch off of business AC during the day when it’s hottest. Ceiling fans aren’t an option (yet), so here’s what I’ve been doing to beat the heat.

Keep the windows close and the blinds down during the day. This makes it darker, but also cooler, since our place retains some evening coolness for quite a while. Unfortunately, this also makes it kind of stuffy, which leads to…

Use a small fan. I have a little fan that I’ve used to good effect since college. It works best in the evening when I can prop it up against an open window, but it’s also useful for some targeted cooling. When I’m working on the computer, I set it up so that it’s blowing across my face which helps me avoid the sensation of stuffy air.

Stay up late, sleep late. This doesn’t work for Maggie because she has to be up on other people’s schedule, but since I work whenever I like, I tend to stay up later and only go to sleep once it cools down around 2am. I’ve thought about also taking a siesta in the hottest part of the afternoon, but I don’t want to get my sleep schedule too out of wack. I do sometimes have to be up relatively early.

Open the windows in the evening Around here, things start to get reasonably cool around 8pm. I open the front windows and the back door (it has a screen) and let the breeze come through. It’s probably not much of a temperature difference, but it sure feels good and it only gets better as it gets darker.

It’s all pretty low-tech and common sense, but it works pretty well. I do wonder if I’m missing anything, though. I haven’t really had to deal with extreme heat since my freshman year when my dorm didn’t have AC.

What do you do to keep cool and reduce your AC usage?

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I just returned from Day One of an environmental education symposium in Indianapolis. There was a lot of good stuff but the highlight was probably a keynote presentation by Richard Louv, author of “Last Child in the Woods.” His book has become an essential resource for environmental educators and he was even more inspiring as a speaker, despite the (typical) webinar glitches we experienced at the conference. His basic tenant is that children (and adults) need quality time in a natural setting to be happy and healthy. The book argues his point persuasively and also provides ideas of how to overcome the obstacles that keep kids indoors. He acknowledges that it will require work from lots of different fronts - parents, teachers, administrators, governments, and even kids.

But the thing I found most inspiring about his talk was the simple message that what kids need most of all right now is to be given hope. They are constantly bombarded with messages about how the environment is being destroyed and it is easy for them (us?) to feel completely powerless and just let go. They need adults to tell them it’s not too late to connect with nature and to protect the environment.

I thought this was expressed best by a teenage video game aficionado who read “The Last Child in the Woods” and started up a website called GEEKS in the Woods.

The first thing we want to say is that we are young but we are people. We have opinions, concerns, doubts, fears, and questions about everything on this planet including wild places in the great outdoors, obesity and health issues that include the mental state of our parent’s generation because they all seem so stressed out!

Sometimes we feel like a “bug in a jar” under a magnifying glass. We appreciate that you study us and we are certain that your research is vital. But remember, you were all once young people, too. We are not a strange, unique, or newly discovered species. Whatever you really liked about nature and being outside will probably hit the mark with us in a big way as long as nature is still there!

What do we want to do outside? Absolutely nothing…unless you can show us the “YO” factor…unless you can explain how we are linked to the outdoors and the planet…unless you can make it relate directly to our life. If you make it personal and global, we will notice!

We are primarily indoor kids. Some people have indoor cats…we are indoor children. But that doesn’t mean that we can’t enjoy being outside. We don’t have to wear an air tight NATURE SUIT with a helmet and an oxygen tank to go out in the woods. However, some of us don’t know this unless you prove it to us…and prove it again and again!

We tend to be very wary of the unknown….everything from trying to watch tv without a remote control to asking our parents to take us on a hike. We probably won’t ask them, but hope they’ll keep asking us because we like to be pursued!

We love Bambi and other Disney movies but if most of us saw a real deer in the real woods we’d be terrified…unless someone shows us that not only is knowledge of nature important but that WE are part of nature. We might still be afraid (because, darn! Look at those antlers!!) but we probably won’t run away and we’ll eventually love it.

Parents, teachers, interpreters, directors, policy makers…who ever you are, please realize that we recognize sincerity. We know when you care about what you are doing and we know when you care that we care.

When you take us outside or present a program to us, please pay close attention to our reactions and our needs. Sometimes we are hesitant to tell you. We like attention. Lots of attention. (You love us, right? Right?)

We need you to experience whatever it is that we are experiencing with us…even if you’ve seen it, touched it, done it a million times before. That is the magic YOU possess to capture OUR attention!

Just make it fun!

We are a techno generation. But that doesn’t mean that we have to learn everything through technology. Oh, we like it, but don’t think you have to make it beep or light up to get our attention.

Those of us who have crossed the great barrier and realized that nature is way cool and that being outside is “sweeeeeet!!” can tell you that the sound of the wind in the trees, the oxygen in our lungs, the song of a bird, the feel of sun on our face, the warmth of a campfire or a starry sky overhead cannot be improved through technology. Oh, it can be enhanced, but please realize that you can get our attention with the real stuff.

That is what it is all about anyway….being REAL! (Radical, Environmental, All-healthy and Longterm)

Sincerely,

GEEKs in the Woods

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Looks like we spoke too soon. Financing is taking longer than expected, so we probably won’t close for another two weeks.

In the meantime, I’m reading up on electrical work and solar panels. Electricity is so cheap in Indiana that it’s hard to justify the expense of solar panels, especially given the other things we could be spending money on (like an electric scooter or a metal roof). There also aren’t any local subsidies for photovoltaics, although the federal subsidy is nice.

I’ve pretty much come to the conclusion that it’ll be best for us to start small and work our way up. Maybe put some solar panels on the garage to run the lights and stuff there. Of course, even that’ll need a pricey connection to the grid or an equally pricey battery system. If we do eventually get an electric scooter, it might be worth it to set up a solar system to charge that, since we’ll already have the batteries.

Even so, I still like to read about whole-house solar conversions. That particular article, about a couple in Vancouver who set up a whole-house system, was interesting and even inspirational! It lays out the steps they took and the cost of all of the components (in Canadian and US dollars). Their overall cost was about $10,000 (US), which seemed low compared to the systems I’ve priced before.

After getting curious and reading the article, rather than skimming the tables and pictures, I realized that it’s because getting solar panels wasn’t their first step. The first thing they did was to reduce their electrical usage to 3kW/day. That’s a little less than 1100kW a YEAR. At our electric prices, that would be about $80 a year. We spend more than that per month!

Okay, that’s not quite a fair comparison since our current place is heated by an electric furnace. Even in the summer, we spend about $60, which amounts to about 12kW/day. In addition to the energy saving techniques that we use (CFLs, air drying clothes, etc.), this couple replaced their old appliances. replacing those appliances reduced their electrical needs by 78%! If we could manage that kind of reduction, we’d be using less than 3kW a day as well.

While we’re still in the apartment, we can’t change appliances. It’s hard to know what to expect when we move into the house. Many of the appliances seem pretty old, so we might be able to cut our usage down to 3kW or less. On the other hand, it’s a lot more space to heat and cool and I’m not sure the ceilings are high enough to install ceiling fans.

In any case, I’ve decided to shift my focus from solar panels to efficient appliances. Reducing our consumption is a lot easier than trying to power it all with solar!

And I fully expect frequent commenter Andy to chip in with an I-told-you-so. He’s been saying the same thing for a while and it just hadn’t clicked for me. I may be slow, but I do get there in the end, Andy!

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