Holding myself accountable (Petroleum junkie, part 3)

A view from the train on one of my recent commutes.

The deal with resolutions is that we tend to start off full speed, full of enthusiasm and, well, resolve. Before long, however, both enthusiasm and resolve tend to wane.

Last month, in large part in reaction to the Gulf of Mexico oil disaster and my increasing awareness of abuses perpetuated by the petroleum industry, I resolved to decrease my own personal dependence on petroleum. I followed up with a list of specific actions, and specific goals. Among other things, I had committed to tracking much of our fuel consumption.

Part of why I am sharing these details here is to maintain my resolve. I will cut down on my fossil fuel consumption. But the will may need continued prodding.

Electricity

Tracking electricity usage was painless, thanks to my electric company listing kilowatt hour usage by month for the past 12 months. Tracking was painless, but the results were painful. I thought we were more moderate electricity users, but we are on the high end for our region. Our usage for the last 12 months averaged 921 kwh per month. While the average US household uses 920 per month, our state only averages between 500 and 618 kwh. (The second number is from a spreadsheet available from this site with usage by state.)

While I haven’t yet measured the electricity usage of specific items, I have rounded up the following suspects: lights and fans left on unnecessarily, and electronics. I think our past tendency to leave our stereo/home theater receiver on was a drain. We also have a lot of computers, including one large one that has been acting as a server, for a while for John’s work, but mostly as our electronic media repository. We have now gotten into the habit of turning off stereo and video equipment when not listening/watching, and John has set the server to power down at night. We have become more vigilant about turning off lights, fans and air conditioners when we leave rooms, as well.

The good news is that our usage is showing a downward trend. Our July statement showed 854 kwh compared to last July’s 946, a decrease of over 9%. June showed a 20% decrease over last year. (I have no idea why our usage was particularly high last June. 1063 kwh. It wasn’t air conditioning, as that was a cold and rainy month. What on earth were we doing? Giving each other electric shocks?)

I finally got around to signing up for one of my electric company’s renewable energy options. I have yet to get a bill showing the new rates. The cost by wattage will increase, but I’m hoping that our efforts to reduce usage will offset this. We shall see…

Heating oil

Tracking heating oil was more annoying, as I had to go through my bills month by month. (There’s no summary of deliveries.) Deliveries are also somewhat irregular, in both timing and amount, so when I found that I was missing a statement, I couldn’t really guess how much oil was delivered that month, or be certain that oil was even delivered that month. I finally came across the missing bill (helpfully mixed in with phoebe’s art papers), so have added that to my spreadsheet.

While I haven’t found great sources it looks like the average US household using heating oil uses 730 gallons per year, and in the Northeast US is 822 gallons. It looks like we have had 785 gallons delivered to our home in the past 12 months, which puts us slightly lower than the average for our region.

I can’t tell yet how much our usage is changing, but I think I have reduced my hot water usage. The real chance to improve, though, will come in the winter. With that in mind, I have contacted a company that makes storm windows that may work for us, which should significantly reduce the winter draftiness of our house.

Gasoline

Gasoline was the hardest of the three to track, since we don’t tend to file our receipts. I did go through our credit card statements for the last year, and logged all gas station transactions. I only have dollar amounts, not gallon amounts, but this at least gives me a general sense of frequency of filling the tanks. My sense is that we have filled them frequently. I haven’t really worked out the estimates of how frequently yet.

I’m happy to say that I have taken the train to work much more often. This is easy to track, as I bought a 12-ride pass on June 8th, and have used all 12. Each of those saved me about 35 miles of driving. I’ve even gotten a second 12-ride pass. In fact, due to slower summer schedules, I’ve only needed to drive into work maybe 3 times in the last couple months. (Plus there have been a few trips for recreational reasons.)

Other stuff

I have been doing pretty well with buying local food. I found a place to buy eggs that is only a couple of miles from us, and finally found a farm stand within 10 miles of our house. (I just don’t understand how local produce can be so hard to find in such a rural area. Gah!) We also managed to go blueberry picking a few times at the place down the road…before they abruptly closed for the season. (No!)

I have been doing a good job with reducing our use of new plastic containers. I have used my stainless steel water bottle regularly, and (aside from when I was travelling) have only resorted to buying bottled water a couple of times.

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There. That’s the skinny on my recent efforts to reduce my fossil fuel gluttony. If anyone has actually read this far, you deserve a prize. Like maybe a big, fat virtual hug from me.

1 down, 364 to go

001:365 A wild raspberry from my yard in a shiny bowl.

I have signed on to participate in Project 365, a project which encourages people to learn to count past 364. I keep counting up to about 12, and then I get distracted by something shiny. Why just the other day, I was looking in the fridge to see how many eggs we had and then hey look somebody dropped a dime. I wonder how many dimes I have? Maybe I’ll count them. Did I ever mention that I once had a dime collection? They were shiny.

Where was I? Oh, right. Project 365. A project wherein/whereby/wherefore/whatif/whatwasIsaying people take (at least) a picture a day, and share a picture a day online. The lovely Sue has rounded up a crew to join her in this daily shutterbugginess. I have joined the crew. I’ve never done crew before. I hope this isn’t too strenuous. My freshman roommate was in crew. She had to run a lot. Every day. I can’t run to save my life. And certainly not every day. Hopefully I will be able to manage to take and share photo every day, and hopefully it won’t need to be to save my life. (As far as I know, there are no fatal consequences of missing a day, but perhaps I didn’t read all the fine print.)

I don’t plan to inflict all of my photos on you here. (Just some of them.) If you would like to see all of them, I’ll be aiming to put them up daily on my shiny new Flickr stream. Oooo, shiny.

doodle beads

Phoebe’s butterfly.

Phoebe’s fire in a fireplace.

Phoebe with her hippo.

Phoebe with her birthday cake.

Phoebe dismantling my cake.

I don’t think I ever properly thanked Holly for the fun Mardi Gras beads she sent us. They are ever-so-shiny, and good for all kinds of fun games.

looking at cars in the driving rain

Last Saturday, the hourly forecast showed quick storms at 1:00 and then again later in the afternoon, but with otherwise sunny skies and relatively low chance of precipitation. Even with the chance of rain, we decided to motor on to get to Micro Mini Car Day.

As predicted, the morning was clear and hot. We’d hoped to leave around noon to make the start of the car show at 1:00, but with the typical challenges of getting everyone fed and otherwise ready to go, it was closer to 1 by the time we got the kids buckled into the car. As I ran back to the house to grab one last thing, John called out to me to also grab some umbrellas.

I don’t have many superstitions, but I know for certain that the best way to avoid rain is to bring an umbrella. In this respect, the umbrellas failed us. Which is not to say that we were sorry to have them with us.

The hourly forecast was partially correct. It did indeed rain around 1. But it then continued to rain. And rain. And rain hard. And then it rained harder, and it rained some more. And did I mention that it rained?

I did manage to get a few photos, though, as I huddled under my umbrella.

Here is Phoebe with a bigger Mini. (I have a photo of her with the same Mini from last year.)

As you can see, the attendees were still very enthusiastic about the event. Here is someone braving the rain to photograph a convertible Isetta along with some sort of matching toy version. (I was very curious about the sort of pod-like, three-wheeled gray thing on the right, but didn’t have much chance learn what it was. Note that there is also what appears to be a black pole sticking out of the roof of the museum. That was my umbrella strap.)

Here’s are a couple of bigger Isettas. They seat 4!

Here’s that gray pod thing again, which I think looks a lot like the end of a bullet train or monorail. But a whole lot smaller.

I took this photo from the gift shop, up in the museum building, where I’d gone to get a t-shirt for John. (John’s shirt had gotten completely soaked while he was pushing Theo in the stroller, while trying to keep his umbrella moderately covering Theo.)

We spent quite a while inside the museum waiting for the rain to lighten up. Um…it didn’t.

By 4:00, the scheduled end of the show, the rain finally started to slow. By the time we returned to our car, it was barely raining at all. Then the clouds parted, and the sun came back out.

This is all to say that we went to the car show, but it was very wet. This wetness was, further, the only period of such wetness the whole weekend.

I was not sorry that we went, but it wasn’t quite the experience I might have hoped for. For one thing, they weren’t able to have the rides in the cars, at least not after we arrived. The rain was torrential, for one thing. And the attendees were drenched. (Would you want soggy-bottomed strangers plopping themselves down in your car?) And then to top it all off, a retaining wall collapsed from the rain onto part of the circular driveway where the car rides typically passed. So, no ride in an Isetta for me after all.

But I did have some fun.

The June 2010 Just Posts

Welcome to the Just Posts, a collection of posts on topics of social justice hosted here and at Cold Spaghetti.

• Zoom of knitnut with What really happened in Toronto?
• subWOW of Absence of Alternatives with Do Over: A perfect comeback is a terrible thing to waste
• Sherry of Chaos Theory with Being a refugee for a morning
• Rebecca of Flying Tomato Farm with Single Female Farmer
• Paul of Give a Damn about Poverty? with The World Cup’s in Africa The richest fans are there. So are the poorest…
• Morganna of Lizbeth’s Garden with Ode for the Dead
• Maitri of Maitri’s Vatulblog with Women In Science … Again
• Maggie of okay. fine. dammit. with Pain is pain
• Linda of The Task at Hand Musée des Petroleums Arts
• Lily of Witch Mom with As a Mother, I Parent the Whole World Now…
• kittenpie of Life of ‘Pie with Meaning is Lost
• Emily of Wheels on the Bus with Wrapping and Spirit of it
• becky of I’m just sayin with Father’s Day Do-over
• Bayou Woman of Life in the Louisiana Wetlands with Unofficial Local Oil Leak Update
• antropologa of antropóloga with Evil socialist medicine
• alejna of collecting tokens with petroleum junkie and trying to cut down

The posts of this months roundtable were nominated by:

Elizabeth (Morganna)
Lily (Witch Mom)
Holly
alejna

If you have a post in the list above, or would just like to support the Just Posts, we invite you to display a button on your blog with a link back here, or to the Just Posts at Cold Spaghetti. If you would like to have a post included next month, you can find out how to submit posts and all sorts of other stuff about the Just Posts at the information page.

Beep beep! It’s Micro Mini Car Day!

I decided not to go to away to the conference this week after all.¹

A sweet bonus of not being away this weekend is that I’ll get to go to something fun that I would have otherwise been sad to miss: Micro Mini Car Day at the Larz Anderson Auto Museum. Car shows are not generally my thing, or at least not what I would think of as being historically my thing, and I don’t necessarily consider myself a car buff.

There are, however, a couple of noteworthy exceptions: British cars, and really small cars.² Last year, we went to and enjoyed British Car Day³, a lawn event at the same museum, and when we saw the upcoming listing for Micro Mini Car Day, I was well and truly intrigued.

I have to say the event was even cooler than I’d anticipated. In addition to the Minis and MGs and Smarts and such that I’d anticipated, I got to see all kinds of little cars that I’d never even known existed. I’ve been meaning to share some of the photos from the even for ages, and here I am finally getting around to it. Buckle up!⁴

Seeing as they were my first car crush, I was happy to see some classic Austin Minis. I have long said that I wanted to pinch their little cheeks.

In front of the very impressive museum building is a pair of Isettas, a car that was totally new to me.

The Isetta was also known, not too shockingly, as the “bubble car.” Fond as I am of the Austin Mini, I may want to pinch the cheeks of the Isetta even more. I mean, just look at it!

One of the most striking quirks about the Isetta is that the driver enters through a single front door. (Observe that the little 2-seater above has no side door.) The front door opens sideways on hinges, much like a refrigerator door. By the way, the car was originally made by a company that also made refrigerators. Coincidence?

Below is a picture with one of the “larger” Isetta models with the door open. (In the foreground is one of my own smaller models, who answers to the name of “Phoebe.”)

An especially cool feature of this event is that many of the car owners offer rides to attendees. (You can see people and cars lined up in the background in the photo, below.) I got to go for a ride in this Austin Mini, which was my first time actually inside a classic Mini.

I also went back in line a second time, and scored a ride in this cherry Nash Metropolitain, whose enthusiastic owner was dressed in colors to match her paint.

This year, I’m hoping to have a chance to go for a ride or 2 again–maybe even in an Isetta!

Even if I don’t manage to catch any rides, I’m looking forward to a fun day outside in a beautiful park. There is lots of room to run around, and Phoebe happily did so. (Theo, on the other hand, could barely yet stand.)⁵

And in case you want to see more photos of tiny cars, I’ve put a bunch more in the slideshow below. (If you want to slow down or stop the slideshow, put your cursor over the slideshow to have the controls appear.)

This slideshow requires JavaScript.

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¹ Much as I wanted to attend the conference itself, I couldn’t bring myself to commit to the travel involved. I’m still recovering from two biggish trips in the last couple of months, and it seemed unusually hard on John and the kiddos to abandon them so soon after my return. What finally helped me stop the waffling, or to tip the waffle into the “stay home” side of things, was taking into account both the expense and the fossil fuel gluttony of such a trip. (After all, I am trying to cut down.)

² You might remember the photos I posted from last year’s British Car Day.

³ And yes, I really love the really small British cars. Really.

⁴ Or otherwise brace yourselves, as many of the vintage cars probably didn’t have seatbelts.

⁵ You may recognize the setting as the same as in my photo I called Theo’s World. That’s because I took that one the same day.

light show

On Saturday night, we went to see a fireworks display at a nearby town. It was a perfect night to be outside, with clear skies and a warm breeze to keep the bugs (mostly) at bay. Kids were running around having fun playing with various light toys, and I had fun playing with slow shutter speeds.

Phoebe was very excited to be out past her bedtime. She ran around and danced to the music coming from the big tent set up for the occasion. She loved the fireworks.

Theo was much more mellow, and slightly intimidated by the scene, happy to sit on the sleeping bag we’d spread out and eat snacks. About an hour after we’d settled into our spot on the field, he was ready to go home. But then the fireworks started, and he went from bored and mildly intimidated to downright frightened. He clung to me, shaking.

I confess that, while I felt bad that he was scared, I enjoyed getting the snuggling time with him. He’s at a stage (please let it be a stage!) where he won’t necessarily give me a hug, even once a day. Part way through the fireworks show (which wasn’t terribly long, it being a fairly small town), John and I traded off so that he snuggled and comforted Theo while I took a few more pictures. By the end of the show, Theo had calmed down quite a bit, and was cheerful again. He even agreed that we’d had fun.