New Windows are In Place

windows today. The plan was to get about 1/2 of the windows installed but as I write this they are finishing up installing all but one window (one was damaged and was sent back to Our buddy Mark showed up late last night in order to help Eugene put in our new pellaPella when we picked them up at Lowe's. It will be here in a week or two), pretty slick.

While they took out the old nasty very untight old windows, I spent my time cleaning up some of the many onions we have curing, cleaning dried dill that has been sitting in a dehydrator for a couple of weeks waiting for me to do something with it (dill is a very tedious herb to clean so I avoided doing so for a long time). Now I have around 1/2 pound of dried dill in a freezer. I doubt I will dry any more of it, I have enough to sell and use for the rest of the year.

Waited on a few customers while I was cleaning the dill. Sold some tomatoes, strawberries and green beans.

Than I decided it was time to process tomatoes so I got the Victorio out and put it together, brought in a crate of tomatoes and got to work putting them through the Victorio. After 15 minutes the thing jammed and than fell off the table and tomatoes, tomato juice and tomato waste flew everywhere. I angerly tossed the contraption into the sink (avoiding the thawing turkey) and grabbed a mop to mop up all the tomato crap all over the floor, chair, crate (that was still half full of maters) and table. Took the crate of tomatoes outside and hosed everything down (which meant I found a rotting tomato) and got the crate and fruit really clean.

Now the house is a mess. The boys used some sort of expandable foam that looks a whole lot like marshmallow fluff and that has gotten all over the place (mostly where it needs to be). I have not gone upstairs yet (I think I will avoid doing so until bed time as I heard a lot of crashing up there) but I assume it is messier than the kitchen.

The good news is everything is in place and now all that needs to be done is the finish work, which will start next weekend. Oh yeah and one window is MIA and still needs to be done start to finish.

I gotta say the new windows are marvelous and already are keeping the heat from pouring in the house (and I am certain will keep the cold out of the house). They have an R value of 25 which is far better than the walls that surround them. I don't know what the R value of the old windows was but probably well below an R15. We will be using a lot less energy this winter to keep the house warm and that is a good thing on a lot of levels. For one, it is a very green thing to do and to me, that alone, is worth the $2100 or so this project has cost so far. I am sure by the end of this winter the windows will be close to paying for themselves, certainly over the next 5 years they will in fuel savings alone.

Buy Nothing Day 2007

Driving hybrid cars and limiting industrial emissions is great‚ but they are band–aid solutions if we don’t address the core problem: we have to consume less. This is the message of Buy Nothing Day. Kalle Lasn

Adventures in Conservation

Because there is a pending winter storm we went out shopping for storm supplies and went to Wal-Mart because we thought maybe they would have some cheap sleds (one of the supplies we felt we needed to be able to survive the pending storm-right now our sleds consist of a sheet of heavy plastic that can hold two people). We found a toboggan-like plastic sled and Eugene check with an associate and she said the sled was marked down to $8 and change. So we loaded the sled into the shopping cart where it instantly blocked our view making dealing with the shopping cart a real PITA.

We continued to shop blindly and found there was a real great deal on compact florescent light bulbs-6 for $10 and so we bought them and a few other items such as cheap sunglasses and some butter. Checked out the paltry organic selection in the prioduce section and headed for the checkout. Got to the register and found that the sled that made shopping at Wal-mart more of a PITA than usual was not marked down to $8 and change but was $28. So we said "No Thanks" to that and left the store. We continued to do the rest of our shopping at TSC (dog food) and Kroger (all food items we did not buy at Wal-Mart) and headed home.

Got home and Eugene opened the compact fluorescent bulbs (CFB) and started replacing incandescent bulbs. We had one in the living room that burned out 2 days ago so that was switched to a CFB (the rest of the lights in the living room were already CFB's) and than he changed all the lights in the bathroom to CFB and than found we own a wasteful medicine cabinet/Vanity. It seems, the the CFB are too big. The CFB's fit in the sockets but the bulbs themselves are too big to open the cabinet doors. So today he is going to try and rectify this situation by either moving the light fixtures so the bulbs are a bit higher or lower the doors.

It's not easy being green